Three- to five-year-olds grow emotionally participating in meaningful and challenging physical, social, and problem-solving activities outdoors in an early childhood program on a farm. Caring for animals, planting, raking, shoveling, and engaging in meaningful indoor activities, under adult supervision, children learn to work collaboratively,…

Field trips provide active learning as children have firsthand experience with information they had previously encountered only in textbooks. In this article, the author describes how she used an interesting textbook to plan a field trip for her elementary social studies methods class to Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery (Alabama). The textbook,…

The power of civic education to elicit positive student outcomes has been empirically documented. However, the field is only now beginning to understand the causal processes that bring about these positive changes in young people. "The Civic Mission of Schools" report commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE (2003) lays out…

Students from the University of Montevallo, Alabama's public liberal arts university, re-created the Battle of Shiloh (April 6-7, 1862) approximately twenty miles north of Corinth, Mississippi. For ten weeks in a classroom environment, nineteen students studied strategy, operations, and tactics that affected events nearly 143 years prior. Then,…

The program of instruction described in this monograph is intended to help prepare high school students with educable mental retardation or perceptual/neurological impairments with basic skills necessary for employment success. The focus of instruction is on practical living skills, with group and individual instruction in such areas as taxes,…

This resource guide for the early childhood professional contains creative art activities, active learning experiences, interactive bulletin boards, teacher-made materials, simple cooking projects, inviting fingerplays, songs, and music. The activities are planned to stimulate children's curiosity and senses. Through experiencing these activities,…

This document reports on a science education reform program sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The program is an attempt to overhaul the reform efforts of the Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, and participation in the project has been underway since 1994. Funds from the institute support teacher training in the use and…

This learning packet, one in a group of eight, was developed by the Duke Power State Park in North Carolina for Grades 4-6 to learn to identify macroinvertebrates found in Lake Norman. Loose-leaf pages are presented in nine sections that contain: (1) introductions to the North Carolina State Park System, the Duke Power State Park, the park's…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the relationship of the first two aerospace education workshops conducted by the United States Space Foundation and sponsored by the Univesity of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and the United States Air Force Academy to attitudes and practices of workshop participants regarding aerospace education. To…

This curriculum consists of a Teacher's Guide and a series of 12 instructional modules, that are centered around concepts important in the study of national resource science. The modules are designed to supplement textbooks with activities for students in primary and middle grades (K-8). The titles of the modules are: (1) Natural History of a…

This book highlights programs and ideas that take advantage of small classrooms and of other resources in the local environment. The programs demonstrate the inventiveness and imagination of teachers in small schools. The following chapters are contained in the book: (1) "Draw From All the Resources in Your School," which includes…

A survey of all Kansas physical sciences (chemistry, general science, physical science, and physics) teachers (36 percent return rate) in the Spring of 1991 provided elements of a profile of physical sciences teachers and teaching. Findings are presented concerning teaching assignments, course enrollments, school demographics, teacher background…

Excursions, or field trips, are a common component of early childhood programs, seen as a means of enriching the curriculum by providing experiences with people, places, and things in the community. Although excursions have been used as a framework for research on children's memory development, research on the efficacy of excursions in terms of…

Primarily a collection of lesson plans covering various topics in geography, this document is divided into seven sections. The first section includes three short papers on geography and its place in the curriculum. The second section deals with teaching map skills, evaluating computer software to be used in teaching geography, and ideas for field…

The importance of experiential aspects of biological study is addressed using multi-dimensional classroom and field classroom approaches to student learning. This document includes a guide to setting up this style of field experience. Several teaching innovations are employed to introduce undergraduate students to the literature, techniques, and…