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Teaching Ideas

This article provided three curriculum ideas which were designed for Elementary teachers.   The idea’s included pen-pals, components of a balanced literacy program, and details of parent literacy workshops.  
The first curriculum idea was to have students become pen-pals with other students in different areas.   A second grade teacher in an inner-city school in Toledo, Ohio set up her class to be pen-pals with a first grade class in Tucson Arizona.   The teacher began this lesson in hopes that it would help her students learn real-life lesson but ended up realizing that the letters actually expanded cross-curricular lessons.   The students started off their pen-pal letter lesson by listing what they knew about Arizona and what they wanted to know. Since they were beginning second grade students they were not able to write an entire letter, the teacher wrote the letter in front of the class and had the students copy the model. As they were writing the letter, the teacher pointed out the different parts of a letter. As the school year went along, the pen-pal letters opened opportunities for new lessons in many of the school subjects. In reading, the teacher noticed that the students were excited to find books about Arizona to further their learning.   In Language/spelling/writing, the letters offered hands-on experience on writing complete sentences, using correct punctuation, and the type of sentences they were writing.   The experience of writing to the pen-pals provided the students with new vocabulary. The students were encouraged to use context clues to figure out the meaning of new words and then told to verify their attempt with a dictionary. Math was another subject that the pen-pal letters were used to turn into lessons. The class began to chart and graph the times the sun rose and set in both states. The pen-pal letters also provided lessons in social studies. The students learned of different cultures, religions, languages, and the similarities between Ohio and...