Written from both a personal and a professional perspective, this book discusses how parents can help their children learn by learning along with them. Part One, "The Learning-Teaching Parent," encourages parents to participate in the learning process with their child. Chapters in this section are: (1) "The Learning Child"; (2) "The Roots of…

This paper explores the topic of "ends" in John Dewey's educational theories. It deals with the shift from "capacity" to "potentiality" in Dewey's conception of the learner, revealing that Dewey became aware of flaws in his "Democracy and Education" and sought to correct them. One of the motivations behind…

Designed to give children a sense of the cultural heritage that fairy tales represent, this instructional unit was originally developed to motivate eighth-grade low-level readers and was later adapted for English as a second language classes and for a variety of elementary and secondary school learning levels. Objectives of the unit are to help…

Careful audience analysis should be a major focus of the rhetorical side of technical writing courses for university undergraduates. Student writers need to be taught to appreciate their readers' problems, interests, and motives. Most often, audience analysis is accomplished imaginatively--authors create mental images of their readers. Students…

Mother Goose is well suited to use in the elementary ESL classroom for several reasons. The stories appeal to children's imagination, adhering to the principle that a good story should have surprise value, interesting characters, meaningful conflict, action, and realism. The natural rhythms help develop English intonation, and the stories…

In 1899, Katherine Pettit and May Stone established the first social settlement in the Kentucky mountains. In Chautauqua-like fashion, the women pitched tents in and around the vicinity of Knott County, Kentucky for three consecutive summers. The primary purposes of the social settlement were social justice and community uplift. While the women…

The development of critical thinking skills in students is seen in this presentation as a significant and worthy objective of education, though the realization of this objective will be dependent upon many important factors. Among the factors cited here are, first, that recent major reform efforts have created no barriers to including critical…

The major components of playfulness in kindergarten children are physical, social, and cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and sense of humor. Children who are highly playful also show high scores in divergent and creative thinking. Piaget postulated that after the age of 7 or 8 this quality is replaced by assimilating the objective facts of the…

Research findings indicate that role play can contribute to children's language growth through furthering: (a) growth in imaging, (b) increased recall, (c) discriminative listening, (d) development of novel forms of communication, (e) learning of socially appropriate communication, and (f) motoric actions. Teachers can facilitate role-playing by…

This paper compares the effects of television viewing to the effects of imaginative play on children's cognitive development. The major developmental tasks which confront the growing child are presented and the significance of imaginative play as a critical feature of the child's cognitive and affective development is discussed. The cognitive…

A significant problem with inquiry teaching is that too much emphasis is placed on inquiry as a logical, scientific, and rational way of knowing. Feelings and mood are rarely dealt with except in rather off-handed remarks about intuitive leaps and creative encounters. Few consider what a model of inquiry based on mood and feeling might look like.…

Educators have worked long and strenuously, but a unified English curriculum has not yet been attained. The language arts-skills approach, the communications approach, and the tripod approach haven't worked. Recently, modern linguists have argued that language study belongs to the liberal arts, not to the behavioral sciences; behaviorists have…

This paper examines the developmental stages of haptic perception (the process of recognizing objects by the sense of touch alone), and attempts to clarify some conflicting results of studies of the effects of memory and object type. The paper also presents a specific study of haptic perception in 144 preschool and kindergarten children from…

A group of language class activities use photographs to encourage students to identify, describe, imagine, recount, and persuade in a variety of ways. (MSE)

Suggests ways in which students can elaborate upon activities for improving thinking skills to produce interesting and creative poetry. (JC)