Primary teachers often struggle to find high quality literature for use with their first-grade students. Therefore, a list of award winning books was evaluated for characteristics that lend themselves to teaching reading comprehension strategies and literary elements. The Golden Kite Award, an annual award which provides a grant to the winning…

Turkey's Ministry of National Education aims to identify and develop valuable characteristics to prepare the nation's young for their professional life as adults. The Ministry has been conducting an extensive and comprehensive review of the educational system since the beginning of 2000. Educational system was implemented in time for the 2012/2013…

We report on a design based research study exploring how the organization of classroom activity impacts early elementary students' critical criteria for evaluating representations in science class. The ability to critique representations produced by others as well as one's own is an important practice when working with representations. Effective…

Children of all ages love painting to music. Aside from discovering the natural correlation between music and art, the author's students learned about Mozart's life and work in music class. In this article, students discover the influence that music can have on their art. (Contains 1 online resource.)

In this piece, we share a story about the power of historical investigation as a means of developing critical literacy in young children. Drawing on the work of VanSledright (Social Educ 68:230, 2004), we outline four aspects of historical thinking as they relate to the development of critically minded citizens. We then turn to a discussion of a…

The provision for allowing local education agencies to use an assessment of a student's response to intervention (RTI) in lieu of a consideration of an ability--achievement discrepancy has been a controversial aspect of the 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. To address issues that have arisen about RTI, a series of…

The purpose of this critical analysis was to investigate the young children's sense of numerical magnitudes and the important attributes of classrooms where children in kindergarten and first grade are exposed to mathematics. This study aimed to offer guidelines that will assist teachers as they teach mathematics to children between the ages of…