Because geography begins right outside the school door, teachers can structure learning activities that link classroom learning to events in the local community and the world. These activities can be organized in a program leading students from description (reading the landscape) through explanation to prediction. (MLH)

Explains how storytelling can help preschoolers develop literacy skills and considers the instructional advantages over reading aloud of the give-and-take between audience and storyteller. Includes a description of a storytelling session. (DMM)

Explains how to implement cooperative learning in the classroom and reasons for doing so. The process involves students working in pairs or small groups to achieve a common goal with the teacher monitoring group activity. Concludes that cooperative learning promotes the academic, social, and emotional growth of students. (DMM)

Suggests procedures for using foreign money as a tool for teaching about other cultures. Explains that this group activity allows students to observe writing systems, illustrations, and designs to hypothesize on the perceived importance of the items. Includes a sample handout and teacher's key showing a Korean banknote. (DK)

Provides an example of how figurative language can be directly taught to elementary students. Provides a collection of figurative sentences that teachers can use with their students. (MG)

Discusses methods for increasing students' appreciation of and interest in history by incorporating the human element into the narrative. Suggests that this can be accomplished by utilizing diaries, journals, oral histories, and living people. Argues that the brief coverage of events presented in texts does little to give students a feeling of the…

Describes a student project for a class on cognitive psychology in which students learn about the application of psychology principles by designing and producing television commercials. Discusses evaluation by both students and teachers. Explains that the principles used include primacy, rehearsal, repetition, and cue dependence. (DK)

Describes a group project from a course on rural, countercultural communitarians' attempts to create utopian communities. Explains that the project gives students the opportunity to integrate material from a variety of sources and to apply it to a group term paper. Suggests that the project utilizes experiential methods for learning abstract…

The Directed Spelling Thinking Activity (DSTA) is a method of teaching spelling to students with learning disabilities by encouraging active thinking and analysis of word patterns. With DSTA, students compare and contrast words that fit different but related spelling patterns. Words illustrating 37 spelling patterns are listed. (Author/DB)

Provides insight into programming for preschoolers. Finds that adults continue the educational process with their children long after they have left the classroom. (CCM)

This study reports on the strategies (overt and subtle) employed by students in one senior secondary school in Botswana to keep their teachers in an information-giving position. Contrary to the prevailing view that the 'teacher dominance' of classroom activities so often reported in classroom studies results from teachers' desire for social…

An acronym, a word formed from the first letters of other words, is often used to name products or organizations. For example, when Hermione Granger, a very clever student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is enraged over the wizarding world's treatment of house-elves, she creates an organization to help put an end to this injustice.…

The Web is mistakenly viewed by too many as the panacea for a teacher's ills. Sending students to the Internet for information has done little to turn the tide in students' perceptions of learning. The problem, though, is not necessarily that the Web is not loaded with excellent learning resources; rather the problem is in sticking to the…

If a teacher were to ask his/her students what they do when they find ants or other insects in their homes, their most common response would probably be, "Get the bug spray!" Because students are not only being exposed to pesticides but are also developing patterns of behavior likely to continue throughout their lives. Discussions about…

Making magic in the classroom or library media center is as simple as imitating what choreographers do. Just as they demonstrate and teach a dance routine a few steps at a time before asking the performers to put all the steps together for a presentation, many teachers find that breaking a unit of study into several parts, or mini-lessons, is a…