Through children’s books, interviews with Black children’s authors and illustrators, classroom activities, online history resources, and powerful documentaries, we celebrate and learn about the lives and contributions of African Americans.
Philip Bunting’s delightfully playful and thoughtful nonfiction picture book, The Wonderful Wisdom of Ants, encourages kids to think twice about the six-legged scuttlers we know as ants.
To comprehend a story or text, young readers need a threshold of knowledge about the topic, and tougher state standards place increasing demands on children’s prior knowledge. This article offers practical classroom strategies to build background knowledge such as using contrasts and comparisons and encouraging topic-focused wide reading.
Young children are naturally curious. Early childhood educators and parents can build on children’s questions, eagerness, and enthusiasm to help them learn science.
Exposing young children to informational text early on can help them to handle the literacy demands of fourth grade and beyond. Practical instructional techniques can be used to promote understanding and enjoyment of informational texts. The three techniques described here — Text Impression, Guiding Questions, and the Retelling Pyramid — can help children become familiar with the language and structure of non-fiction books.
Learn along with Early Start students at Jubilee Housing in Washington, DC, as they get to know all about bugs and begin to appreciate insects for the many things they do for us — and for their uniqueness and the diversity they bring.
Award-winning author and beekeeper Meghan P. Browne shares buzzworthy ideas and resources to help families to learn about insects! Her book The Bees of Notre-Dame takes you on a journey of resilience to Paris to learn about the bees who lived atop Notre-Dame and survived the fire that destroyed part of the cathedral in 2019.
Discover some simple hands-on activities and games that can be done at home or in the backyard to help your child develop a deeper understanding of cause and effect — and strengthen reading comprehension and scientific inquiry skills.
Find out what you as a parent can be doing to help your young learner navigate the digital world — you may need to reconsider how you connect with your child during technology use.
ELL expert Susan Lafond provides an overview of the ways in which Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy differ from the standards that states currently use. She also discusses the ways in which these shifts will impact ELL instruction.
This article explains how to teach students to identify the compare-contrast text structure, and to use this structure to support their comprehension. It also shows how to use compare-contrast texts to activate and extend students’ background knowledge and expand and enrich their vocabulary.
Less is known about the components of effective mathematics instruction than about the components of effective reading instruction, because research in math is less extensive than in reading.
