Tend Your Garden offers an original and adaptable classroom model, built on a foundation of educational research, for motivating young adolescent writers. The Young Adolescent Motivation Model of Writing (YAMM) places the young adolescent learner, aged 11-14, at its center, surrounded by the components needed to motivate the learner to high levels of academic composition or creative writing. The components of the model are: teaching to the whole child; developing a writing community; presenting motivating, high-interest lessons; integrating process writing across the curriculum; offering choice and critical thinking; building upon each writer's strengths; and using authentic assessment. Each component is revealed within succeeding chapters that blend best practice pedagogy with related theory. Sample lessons that fit the needs and engagement levels of young adolescent writers are provided, representing a wide array of writing genres and content area subjects. The YAMM model and the illustrative lessons build upon a background of motivation theory, authentic inquiry, and multi-modal responses. Literature, drama, music, drawing, and painting are offered both as invitations to writing and as responses to writing, and these are applied within a process-based, workshop format, with teacher modeling of each stage of the writing process. The approach recognizes motivation that is tied to the needs of young adolescent writers and that places responsibility on students in their development as writers and learners, while the teacher assumes a facilitative and supportive role of discovering the strengths, interests, and literacy needs of each student. The holistic, learner-centered process approach represented by the YAMM model nurtures students' motivation for achieving success in writing because it necessitates evolving, facilitative roles for the teacher in a collaborative writing community decidedly focused on the success of all young adolescent writers. A primary purpose for writing the text is to identify and describe the characteristic needs of young adolescents, and what these needs imply for those student writers, to the key adults in their lives-teachers, school officials, and parents-who undoubtedly support these young people's achievements. The author selects and weaves thirty years of classroom teaching experiences into each chapter, highlighting memorable moments with her students and inserting her own reflections and inspirations of learning to write along with her students.

The ultimate collection of sustainable 3D art projects for the primary classroom. Learn how to teach children to create everything from rainforest scenes to robots with these innovative, easy-to-follow ideas from 3D art expert Darrell Wakelam. These low-cost projects use readily available materials to create exciting models, masks and sculptures which will inspire children and enhance your art and design lessons. Each of the 50 projects in Art Shaped features: - simple core techniques to transform cardboard into incredible artwork; - full-colour photographs and clear step-by-step instructions; - ideas for differentiation for all ages and abilities; - detailed suggestions for links to other subject areas across the curriculum. This book enables you to develop children's techniques and skills through high-quality, eco-friendly art projects while encouraging them to be creative, use their imagination, and most importantly, have fun. 'What Darrell Wakelam doesn't know about art and 3D sculptures isn't really worth knowing! A must-have.' Dena Mulligan, EYFS/Key Stage 1 Lead

180 Days of Spelling and Word Study is a fun and effective daily practice workbook designed to help students improve their spelling skills. This easy-to-use kindergarten workbook is great for at-home learning or in the classroom. The engaging standards-based activities cover grade-level skills with easy to follow instructions and an answer key to quickly assess student understanding. Each week students practice phonetic patterns while exploring letters and sounds. Watch students become better spellers with these quick learning activities.Parents appreciate the teacher-approved activity books that keep their child engaged and learning. Great for homeschooling, to reinforce learning at school, or prevent learning loss over summer.Teachers rely on the daily practice workbooks to save them valuable time. The ready to implement activities are perfect for daily morning review or homework. The activities can also be used for intervention skill building to address learning gaps.

Mastering Primary Music introduces the primary music curriculum and helps trainees and teachers learn how to plan and teach inspiring lessons that make music learning irresistible. Topics covered include: * Current developments in music * Music as an irresistible activity * Music as a practical activity * Skills to develop in music * Promoting curiosity * Assessing children in music * Practical issues This guide includes examples of children's work, case studies, readings to reflect upon and reflective questions that all help to exemplify what is considered to be best and most innovative practice. The book draws on the experience of a leading professional in primary music, Ruth Atkinson, to provide the essential guide to teaching music for all trainee primary teachers.

While phonics instruction is important for all readers, it is essential for older students whose underdeveloped reading skills impede content-area learning. This resource offers dozens of practice pages that give struggling readers multiple opportunities to recognize, review, and reinforce must-know phonics elements, such as consonants, long and short vowels, blends, digraphs, and more. With this practice, students dramatically improve their ability to recognize sound-spelling relationships and use these skills to accurately and efficiently decode words, which in turn boosts fluency and comprehension. For use with Grades 3-6.

Concept mapping has often been acknowledged as an efficient instrument for aiding students in learning new information. Examining the impact this tool provides in STEM fields can help to create more effective teaching methods. Advanced Concept Maps in STEM Education: Emerging Research and Opportunities highlights both the history and recent innovations of concept maps in learning environments. Featuring extensive coverage of relevant topics including object maps, verbal maps, and spatial maps, this publication is ideal for educators, academicians, students, professionals, and researchers interested in discovering new perspectives on the impact of concept mapping in educational settings.

This volume draws on findings from the Canada-China Nature Notes Reciprocal Learning Program to explore cross-cultural exchanges in science education in and outside of the classroom. Under the collaborative reciprocity perspective, cross-cultural learning needs to go beyond simple comparison in practices, values, and results and moves to a paradigm that emphasizes a two-way learning process in the context of acting together. Through collaborative work between the international teams and partner schools, the program described in this book shows how collaborative efforts between the two sister schools worked to raise awareness about Chinese farming culture and extend students' outdoor learning experiences. In this book, educators from across the research team share their insights and reflect on the cross-cultural collaborative process and how it impacted the learning experiences of themselves and their students.

David Colander has been writing about economic methodology for over 30 years. His pragmatic approach sees applied policy methodology as rooted in what economists actually do, not in what methodologists say they should do. It sees applied policy methodology as constantly evolving as analytic and computational technology changes, evolving far too fast to be subject to any rigid scientific methodology. That problem is that economists generally think of applied policy analysis as applied science. Colander argues that using a scientific methodology to guide applied policy undermines good policy analysis. Instead, he contends that economists should use a much looser engineering methodology that blends science, heuristics, inescapable moral judgments, and creativity into what he calls the art and craft of economics. Here, Huei-chun Su has selected seventeen of Colander's articles that spell out and capture his arguments at various levels - some formal academic articles dealing with cutting edge methodology, and some more popular articles making the case for his approach. An original introduction and annotated bibliography serve as excellent resources for further exploring his arguments. Clear, well-structured, and written in plain English with little jargon, the book is approachable and suitable for anyone interested in the current and future state of economics and the economics profession. This includes students at any level as well as methodologists, applied economists, historians and critics of modern economics.

The features of chemistry that make it such a fascinating and engaging subject to teach also contribute to it being a challenging subject for many learners. Chemistry draws upon a wide range of abstract concepts, which are embedded in a large body of theoretical knowledge. As a science, chemistry offers ideas that are the products of scientists' creative imaginations, and yet which are motivated and constrained by observations of natural phenomena. Chemistry is often discussed and taught largely in terms of non-observable theoretical entities - such as molecules and electrons and orbitals - which probably seem as familiar and real to a chemistry teacher as Bunsen burners: and, yet, comprise a realm as alien and strange to many students as some learners' own alternative conceptions ('misconceptions') may appear to the teacher. All chemistry teachers know that chemistry is a conceptual subject, especially at the upper end of secondary school and at university level, and that some students struggle to understand many chemical ideas. This book offers a step-by-step analysis and discussion of just why some students find chemistry difficult, by examining the nature of chemistry concepts, and how they are communicated and learnt. The book considers the idea of concepts itself; draws upon case studies of how canonical chemical concepts have developed; explores how chemical concepts become represented in curriculum and in classroom teaching; and discusses how conceptual learning and development occurs. This book will be invaluable to anyone interested in teaching and learning and offers guidance to teachers looking to make sense of, and respond to, the challenges of teaching chemistry.