June is National Zoo and Aquarium Month, and a field trip to an animal sanctuary is the perfect way to celebrate. To ensure a field trip that supports your educational objectives, careful planning is key. Before the trip, make sure you write two or three objectives you expect your class to achiev...
Food webs and ecosystems are great middle school topics because they are intuitive, visual, and ripe for all kinds of hands-on and multimedia activities to illustrate the underlying concepts. Because they are so universally understood, these topics make a great jumping-off point to come back and ...
I love natural disasters. Well, that is, I love to teach natural disasters. Kids are so engaged and interested in them. Perhaps it is the equivalent of rubber-necking while at the scene of a highway accident, or maybe such disasters evoke an instinctive, emotional response. Whatever the reason, p...
Are freckles inherited? How about wrinkles? How do we determine such things? In this article, I will provide some ideas for teaching the following concept: some characteristics are inherited while others result from interactions with the environment.
With fifth graders, it may be too ambitious t...
At the middle school level, we are interested in learners being able to distinguish between the basic structures and functions of plant and animal cells. As they move into higher grades, they must be able to make observations and describe the structure and function of organelles found in plant an...
What fifth grader isn't fascinated by bobcats eating bunnies, crows eating caterpillars, and pill bugs eating poop? Food webs are an interesting topic and include the learning of new and notable vocabulary, such as predators, parasites, scarcity, scavengers, composers, and decomposers.
There is ...
Perhaps one of the most beloved of all children’s book authors and illustrators is Eric Carle. His work focuses on a variety of topics from nature. From ladybugs to caterpillars, from cats to fireflies, Carle covers it in rich color and fascinating textures. While an author study seems like a nat...
