Inspired by "choose your own adventure" books, this unit activity helps students differentiate between ontology, epistemology, axiology, methodology, and method. While completing the activity over two weeks, students apply these concepts to the study of a topic of the instructor's choosing (illustrated here through the lens of family…

Use the 6-step instructional approach and examples in this article to bring civics learning and understanding to your elementary students.

Integrating content-area and literacy instruction in primary-grade classrooms creates authentic and engaging opportunities for students to build background knowledge and literacy skills. Furthermore, when students engage in meaningful dialogue about content-area topics they can discuss complex ideas and use content-specific vocabulary. These…

The purpose of this article is to provide physical education and classroom teachers basic bilingual yoga postures and cues that can be used as part of their curriculum content or as physical activity breaks or transitions during their lessons.

This article addresses the importance of teaching controversial issues, especially within elementary school contexts. In particular, the article explores the underlying elements of justice within controversies and demonstrates the way in which teachers might explore procedural justice within an elementary classroom.

This article provides a practical illustration of how culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) and evidence-based practices (EBPs) can be integrated into a mathematics curriculum to address social justice issues. A vignette is provided to illustrate how a secondary teacher infused social justice education in a seventh-grade mathematics lesson through…

Researchers agree that attention to bilingualism and biliteracy can and should be a goal in all educational settings where young dual language learners are present. The challenge, however, is how to promote biliteracy development while remaining congruent with principles of developmental direction, specifically the idea that children's…

Vocabulary is the basis for all content area learning, including physical education. This article presents several easily implemented vocabulary strategies that support content learning within the cognitive domain of physical education by reinforcing conceptual understanding and relationships. These strategies include: concept circles,…

Input-based incremental (IBI) vocabulary instruction is an approach that emphasizes presentation of target vocabulary in the input and the gradual development of multiple aspects of vocabulary knowledge over time. This article demonstrates how the IBI approach can be utilized to facilitate the acquisition of German vocabulary as part of…

Understanding, reading, and writing using academic language has increasingly become a focus in our schools. One of the salient features of academic vocabulary is morphological complexity. Many words are considered derivationally morphologically complex, meaning they have roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Affixes can be challenging for students as…

Many children struggle to communicate explicitly about the relationships between variables and concepts that are central to science content. In order for students to talk and write like scientists, they need to acquire ways of using language common in science discourse. For example, in the writing above, the student uses the word "play"…

This article reports on an English for academic purposes course designed following the tenets of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) to address the needs of language minority (LM) high school graduates entering Canadian universities. The language used in and required of post-secondary study is challenging for many LM students,…

In this article, the author offers some practical support for teaching about weather, climate and climate change. In England, weather and climate are traditionally taught within the geography curriculum, although it is actually a very scientific subject, involving skills such as making careful observations and measurements, interpreting data…

One of the most challenging tasks in increasingly diverse classrooms is helping students develop the "knowledge and language of science to communicate scientific explanations and ideas" (NRC 1996, p. 144). In this article, the authors share one of their favorite methods for incorporating and reinforcing science vocabulary instruction in…

Today, English language learners (ELLs)--students whose primary language is other than English--are the fastest-growing major school population in the United States. Between 2000-01 and 2010-11, the number of these students, whose level of English proficiency is not sufficient to support learning in a regular English language classroom, rose 18…