Describes how Michigan's English Language Arts Assessment (ELA) takes parts of the old fifth-grade writing assessment and fourth-grade reading tests, adds new elements, and wraps everything around a theme. Presents a seven-step activity to help prepare fourth graders for the ELA. Concludes that the overall impact on scores is not known. (SG)

A pilot hunger awareness program was developed for fourth graders in a low-income elementary school. Objectives were to provide students with information that would increase their awareness of hunger in their communities by helping them identify signs of hunger, food pantries located within their school zip code area, and a resource person in…

Describes a three-year collaborative project, Investigating Our Community, involving teachers and fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. Focuses on moving from mandated curriculum that defines inquiry with known outcomes to inquiry that explores the unknown knowledge and stories of their school's neighborhood. Finds that a community investigation…

Grades four to six in three school districts representing rural, suburban, and urban school settings were exposed to a nutrition program. Results disclosed that students having access to the nutrition unit significantly out-performed students lacking access and that teachers needed to receive pre-implementation inservice education regarding the…

Part of a project to help teachers respond to the challenge of teaching content subjects to a variety of limited-English-proficient (LEP) learners, this report presents the recommendations of a group of master teachers who first identified promising practices for educating minority language students and then supplemented these by selecting…

It is proposed that linguistic oral content, or metalinguistics, be included in the curriculum of primary school francophone children. This content is not included in the functionally oriented official curriculum. The linguistic content proposed consists of a number of formal variants corresponding to non-formal stylistic markers and respecting…

These two mini-units are designed to supplement the areas of study dictated by the Core Knowledge Sequence, a content-rich curriculum used in the educator/curriculum developer's school. The mini-units fall in the middle of a 6-month-long study of the Middle Ages and incorporate the depth of content required to support the larger unit on the Middle…

This report describes a classroom intervention for improving the social skills of fourth-grade students in an urban school. Children in the school were exhibiting poor social skills, as evidenced by lapses in self-discipline and by incidences of inappropriate behavior as noted by teacher observation and anecdotal records. After examining the…

This practicum was designed to incorporate critical thinking skills instruction and practice into a fourth-grade curriculum to increase fourth-grade students' ability to recognize and apply critical thinking strategies to appropriate situations. This program concentrated on the increasing of six critical thinking skills: classification, sequence…

Presents a lesson plan in which students use an encyclopedia to research a famous person. Identifies library media skills objectives, curriculum (subject area objectives), grade levels (4 and 5), resources, instructional roles, activity and procedures for completion, evaluation guidelines, and follow-up activities. Includes a sample worksheet.…

A teacher in gifted education implemented and evaluated a 9-week practicum intervention designed to: (1) produce computer literacy materials that would enable fourth and fifth graders to meet minimal standards for computer literacy in Florida; and (2) produce corresponding in-service materials for teachers. A teacher's manual was developed from…

Study examined differences between self-contained and team teaching approaches when two groups of elementary teachers implemented a physical education curriculum during an inservice. Researchers collected lesson completion forms, specialists' reports, class observations, and teacher surveys. Results indicated those using self-contained approaches…

Discusses the development and implementation of whole science teaching in a departmentalized fourth grade teaching situation. A description of a unit on weather is offered. (BB)

Evaluates the effects of the scaffold explanation-based approach to collaborative discussion on students' understanding of photosynthesis. Forty-eight fourth- and fifth-grade students were divided into groups of high, average control (AC), and average intervention (AI). Students worked collaboratively and individually on two reasoning tasks.…

This applied dissertation was designed to help fourth-grade teachers successfully integrate computer-related technology into the curriculum. The fourth-grade teachers did not incorporate student use of technologies into the curriculum-related activities or plan lessons collaboratively with the researcher. There was no correlation between classroom…