This article discusses the author's use of a performance-based evaluation in his fifth grade Spanish class in a K-5 public elementary school located in Princeton, New Jersey. The author realized the need to break the old testing paradigm and discover a new way of demonstrating student language acquisition since the traditional tests did not seem…

This instructional unit designed to develop higher-level cognitive skills in fifth grade students focuses on a mid-nineteenth century newspaper from the Old Stater Print Shop. Purposes include: (1) to compare and contrast a century-old newspaper with a modern-day paper; (2) to begin planning for a newspaper and to organize a newspaper staff; (3)…

Faced with a market that puts a premium on newness, artwork, and copyright date, the textbook industry seems to have been forced into a hectic textbook revision cycle in which improvement in instructional quality takes a poor second place to more superficial changes. While educators think they are getting newer, different, and, therefore better…

To understand more fully how students' usable knowledge about writing is activated by texts, a study examined how the manipulation of specific text characteristics in the constructed texts influences the verbalization of evaluative criteria. Twenty-seven fifth grade students from a predominantly rural middle school in the southeastern United…

This classroom research project focused on 10 fifth-grade students, all of whom had been labelled low-average achievers by their school. Students were encouraged to read, write, draw, talk, tell stories, and play freely. Five case studies emerged from the interactions. It became apparent that the children were shaping literature to their…

The Drug Resistance Education (DARE) program is designed to prevent drug abuse in Hawaii's children and youth. The program is currently conducted in fifth grade classrooms by uniformed Honolulu Police Department officers. As a primary prevention program, the DARE program is directed at reducing drug abuse incidence rates by targeting total-school…

A study examined students' metacognitive response to ambiguous literacy tasks to determine the relationship between that response and academic achievement. Subjects were 11 students chosen from a fifth-grade classroom in a small, urban school serving a predominantly black, middle class neighborhood. Two literacy tasks were identified as ambiguous:…

As fourth and fifth grade students study this unit in conjunction with their Indiana or U.S. history texts, they see how the Indiana pioneers ate and survived. Many of the foods taken for granted today were eaten by Indians in one of the Americas thousands of years ago. Students learn that the Native Americans had developed agricultural…

This booklet on nutrition for grades 4-6 contains classroom activities as well as recipes for easily prepared nutritious dishes, e.g., applesauce, cookies, bread. Information is provided on the nutritional values of items in the basic food groups, and activity sheets are included. (JD)

Attitudes toward science of magnet school students were compared with those of their counterparts in two regular schools. This study attempted to replicate the findings of a 1988 study by A. Solomon and J. Wroblewski involving the same magnet school, the John Moffett Neighborhood Elementary Science Magnet School located in North Philadelphia…

To evaluate different strategies for improving students' comprehension skills, particularly their inference ability, 42 fifth grade students identified as good or average readers were placed into one of three groups for an eight-week instructional period. Students in one group, the Content and Structure group, received systematic attention, story…

This guide offers a nutrition education program for students in Kindergarten through Grade 6. Activities span all grades as well as activities for the specific level. Nutrition education objectives are stated for each grade level: (1) grade four--students will explore how to balance food intake and energy output for overall health and physical…

A study compared and evaluated alternative theoretical models of the relationship of learning to read and learning to write at beginning and advanced levels of reading development. The reading dimensions of the three models included word analysis, vocabulary, and sentence and passage comprehension components. The writing dimensions included…

A study was conducted to apply what is known about how expository text structure variables enhance main idea comprehension and to determine if restructuring content textbook passages improves such comprehension. Original texts were rewritten to be more "considerate" as follows: the paragraph main ideas were rewritten and placed in the…

This ethnographic study of 22 bilingual Mexican American fifth grade students in rural Texas examines which pedogogical techniques reduced students' risk of failure. Classroom instruction was based on Cummins' model of community intervention in which story-telling, dialogue journal writing, and bilingual dialogue between teacher and students…