In today's rapidly changing world, science fiction can provide a bridge and a stimulus to the imagination of children. Provides an annotated bibliography of 25 science fiction titles for grades 1-3, 4-6, and 7-9. Suggests classroom applications including individual assignments, group discussion topics, and other activities. (LZ)

Provides suggestions for elementary school teachers to use shared reading experiences with their students. Notes that having teacher and students read together encourages classroom discussion, models appropriate reading behavior and pronunciation, and encourages children to think about the book or story. Other benefits of shared reading are…

Describes a weekend residential trip at a British outdoor education center aimed at assessing primary students for the National Curriculum. Instructors constructed personal profiles based on assessment of math, science, geography, and technology and observation of personal and social skills. Formal assessment was conducted during structured group…

Investigates the effects of children solving addition and subtraction problems collaboratively in contrast to solving problems on their own. Explores the effects of ability and gender on the outcomes of group collaboration. Presents and discusses the results. Includes references and an appendix. (CMK)

Describes how to incorporate a game into teaching the Dewey decimal system to elementary students in grades three, four, and five. Provides ideas for a nine-week session that includes five weeks of instruction on the Dewey decimal system, card catalog, and Boolean searching; and four weeks of competition. (LRW)

The environment is a great concern in the 1990s, and everyone needs to work at maintaining our planet. The 1992 Arizona State Library Reading Program, "Rainbow Earth," provides children with many techniques they can use to help the Earth. This reading program guide provides information on the following: goals, objectives, and evaluation;…

Developed for the Texas Reading Club, a program sponsored cooperatively by local libraries and the Texas State Library and designed to encourage children and their parents to read and to use the library, this guide is intended to inspire program ideas, including activities, crafts, books, and audiovisuals, appropriate to the Reading Club's 1987…

The effects of uninstructed and teacher instructed cooperative group learning on the interactive behaviors of 32 nonhandicapped and 16 handicapped (moderately mentally retarded) elementary students and also on the attitudes of nonhandicapped students toward handicapped persons were investigated. In the teacher instructed condition, the teacher…

This teacher's manual contains guidelines for using art, poetry, and music to teach U.S. labor history to elementary school students. Students are expected to work in groups, conduct research on an assigned or selected art print, poem, or song that reflects people at work, and give a class presentation that stresses role playing and student…

Choral speaking in the classroom can heighten students' appreciation of poetry and give them an opportunity to express emotion in groups rather than as individuals. For first attempts at choral speaking, material with a humorous or a ghostly flavor, a good strong rhythm, and a narrative line should be selected. Both the teacher and the students…

This lesson introduces the study of insects in science by using poetry. Students work in cooperative groups to prepare choral poetry readings and present factual information on an assigned insect to the class. The choral poetry readings also serve to increase fluency in English-as-a-second-language students. During four 30-minute sessions,…

An experiment using small, cooperating learning teams to increase cross-ethnic friendships was replicated in Toronto with positive results, using 146 sixth-graders from 6 schools. Cooperation in learning, rarely employed in classrooms, would lessen conflict caused by home-school differences in emphasis on cooperation/competition for indigenous…

Presents three activities to promote participation in group discussions about books. Activity one involves displaying pictures of characters and having students describe them, citing specific actions from the book as proof. Activity two entails listing a story's actions into a flow chart. Activity three involves making a line graph indicating the…

Pairs of friends and pairs of classmates were observed to determine effects of existing social relationships on interactions during cooperative learning. No significant differences between observed interactions were found for 60 third and 70 seventh graders, but friends reported that they engaged in more activities outside the experimental…

Describes an art project that relates a fifth grade arithmetic lesson with a drawing assignment. Students first learned to enlarge a drawing on a grid, and then were given a segment of a cut-up reproduction of a Picasso painting and asked to enlarge and duplicate their portion. Completed pieces were combined for the final product. (LS)