Describes strategies to help students learn how to evaluate their own work using portfolio assessment, a gradual process that enables students to think reflectively about their work. The paper discusses what is involved in teaching students to understand the terms and participate in the process. (SM)

This collection of 18 learning activities pages focuses on the subject areas of science, language arts, mathematics, and social studies. The science activities pages concern the study of earthquakes, sound, environmental changes, snails and slugs, and friction. Many of the activities are in the form of experiments for the students to perform.…

Here are 12 ideas for combining the Christmas season and some creative learning activities for young students. (RK)

Provides some suggestions for elementary teachers to clip, use, and save. (Editor/RK)

This primary unit uses rainbows to provide young children inspiration for learning in the areas of language arts, science, art, social studies, and math. (MT)

Presents a variety of elementary games and learning activities for language arts, reading, math, and science which all relate to the theme of dinosaurs. (SJL)

A teacher discovers the Teddy Bear as something common to her first graders' backgrounds and uses it as a motivator for a creative language arts program. (Author/RK)

Presents a step-by-step approach to using sentences from children's reading and writing to boost spelling skills while incorporating the principles and tying them in with curriculum areas. The steps include choosing a word, coaxing multiple strategies, branching to other words, making the connection, and using the sentence in many different ways.…

This article describes how to play a card game entitled "Is It 10?" which is designed to capture elementary school students' attention while they practice addition, explore number combinations, and learn beginning probability concepts. Suggestions for both primary and older students are provided. (SM)

Fourteen examples are given of teacher-created day-long celebrations which are designed to sharpen students' thinking skills and incorporate math, science, reading, and language arts. The special days include Janus Day, Twins Day, Friendship Day, Interactive Reading Fair, Sixties Day, Clash Day, Generation Day, and Back-to-the-Future Day. (IAH)

Presents an annotated listing of books about all kinds of heroes for elementary school students. Stories include the young King Arthur; an assertive, baseball-playing heroine who becomes a princess; an older brother dealing with his younger brother; a Christmas story; civil rights icon Rosa Parks; and the cow who jumped over the moon. (SM)

Presents a teaching idea to help elementary students gain a sense of the passage of 2,000 years. This time line lesson has students learn when the millennium began, create a personal time line with strips of adding machine tape (marking the tape with their major life events), create a historical time line, then create a 2,000-inch millennium time…

Accountability in elementary social studies should relate to our furnishing the necessary support materials for pupil investigation, and providing meaningful social studies topics from which students can make selections. (Author)

Presents monthly guides on how to teach basic subjects. (RK)