"Who has been to Dairy Queen® and purchased a Blizzard?®" Ms. Bosetti asked her students. During the summer, Bosetti had seen many of her former and future students at the local Dairy Queen enjoying Blizzard desserts and wondered, "Which Blizzard size is the best value?" She used this context for a ratios and proportions task…

In this article, the author argues that critical work in teacher education should begin with teacher educators turning a critical eye on their own practices. The author uses Lesko's conception of contingent, recursive growth and change to analyze a lesson he observed as part of a phenomenological study aimed at understanding more about what it is…

"It's All Connected" provides teachers of mathematics the support they need to improve their instruction. This in-demand collection of lessons for grades 6-8 explores proportionality, proportional relationships, and proportional reasoning, acknowledging that the ability to reason proportionally is crucial in the middle school mathematics…

Publishing podcasts, writing digital stories with "choose your own adventure" endings, and collaborating with students around the country through wikis, Skype, and VoiceThread, Julie D. Ramsay never imagined that she and her fifth grade students would be forging a new frontier using technology to support writing lessons. In a school district with…

Interdisciplinary teaching is a great way to focus on overarching concepts and help students make connections across disciplines. Historically, art and science have been connected disciplines. The botanical prints of the 18th and 19th centuries and early work with microscopes are two examples of a need for strong artistic skills in the science…

Many of the skills and talents required to be a successful scientist, such as analysis, experimentation, and creativity, can be developed and reinforced through art. Both science and art challenge students to make observations, experiment with different techniques, and use both traditional and nontraditional methods to express their ideas. The…

You'll gain plenty of weather resources from this month's issue (temperature concepts, weather instruments, the water cycle/evaporation). You can use that information with these outdoor seasonal connections.

The new Connecticut science standards include a "Science, Technology, and Society" (STS) standard for each grade level. This standard encourages students to explore how scientific knowledge affects the quality of their lives. By relating science concepts to real-world decision making, STS investigations give students a framework through…

Discusses the advantages of teaching with open-ended tasks and compares students' responses to open-ended, closed-area, and perimeter tasks. (ASK)

While trying to explain to his seventh grade students why models are needed to study science, the author stumbled across this project idea. At the time, his class was just beginning to study geology and rocks and minerals. This unit starts by introducing the structure of the Earth so students had very little background knowledge. He wanted a quick…

September 11, 2001, was a critical teachable moment that provided the author of this article and his team with an avenue to middle level curriculum that was relevant, challenging, integrative, and exploratory. Hurricane Katrina opened a similar window of opportunity for middle level educators to focus the minds of young adolescents on important…

Discusses the Math Options Career Day that educates seventh-grade girls about careers in mathematics, science, engineering, and technology. (31 references). (MKR)

Presents examples of students' work to illustrate the typical approaches used at sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade levels and four common threads that are consistent with student development as observed in a Connected Mathematics Project class. (ASK)

This document is a conference presentation on the use of portfolios as an evaluation tool for middle school music students. All of the pages are suitable for use with an overhead projector. Areas covered include reasons for teaching the arts as both an intellectual discipline and vocational education; Illinois state goals for musical learning for…

A reading activity module based on the newspaper was designed for students in grades 6-8 who have had two years of instruction in French as a second language. The module includes the teacher's guide, the facsimile newspaper, and transparencies for class activities. Module objectives are to introduce students to both newspaper reading and…