When the pandemic shut schools down in the spring, teachers mobilized the educational home front and taught themselves how to navigate familiar and unfamiliar instructional challenges in the virtual classroom using the online platform Zoom. Now, teachers and students are in a new school year, amidst a raging pandemic, and witnessing some of the…

It is possible to create a literacy block where teachers meet with students for guided reading and writing conferences, and provide daily explicit instruction in both reading and writing. A comprehensive look at literacy and learning, "100 Minutes" shows teachers how to fit balanced literacy into a daily 100-minute literacy block using a framework…

A teaching team of three teachers aims to prepare students for 21st Century Learning Outcomes, which includes critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills. Yet classroom experience has taught them that one of the most difficult aspects of teaching young children is that they have few experiences or prior knowledge to make sense of…

If American young learners are to become effective participants in a democratic society, then social studies must be an essential part of the curriculum in each of the elementary years. The purpose of elementary school social studies is to enable students to understand, participate in, and make informed decisions about their world. Social studies…

As schools continue to strive to meet federal testing requirements, many schools have been looking at ways to improve. During the 1990's many school districts thought they had found the method, tool, or program, with which to accomplish this goal: the "block schedule". This study was a comparison of the teaching strategies and attitudes of…

This study questions the belief that little or no social studies is being taught in regular elementary education classrooms. That belief is based on time studies and a body of research that looks at curriculum and teacher interviews and concludes that the social studies time block has been decreased in elementary classrooms, therefore little or no…

The purposes of this study were to determine the actual amount of instructional time spent on social studies, to determine the variety of instructional strategies used during social studies instruction, and to assess the frequency and types of technology usage during social studies instruction. As part of addressing the No Child Left Behind Act, a…