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Themes:
Earth Day, National Poetry Month +
Dear %%NAME%%,
Welcome to this month's issue of ProQuest Teachable Moments. This issue focuses on a myriad of topics, including Earth Day, National Poetry Month, diversity, child abuse prevention, and much more.
Our monthly enewsletter delivers a set of hands-on learning activities that encourage students to conduct quality research and produce meaningful results to increase their knowledge and understanding of everything from basic math to literature to history and beyond. Keep in mind that these activities are not duplicated in our other monthly newsletters, which also contain ready-made lessons.
Have an idea or feedback concerning this newsletter? Send email to tim.mclain @ il.proquest.com today.
SIRS® Researcher
What can we do about preventing abuse -- especially cyber-abuse?
Grades 6-12
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April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. Abuse takes many forms besides child abuse.
Recently the ability to abuse others has been empowered by tools of the Internet. Now students can gossip about and threaten each other anonymously and virtually through publicly accessed blogs and social networking sites. Preventing this growing cyber-bullying is the objective of many parents and school leaders today because of the harm that can be inflicted on vulnerable young adults who are struggling for their self-esteem and recognition by their peers.
Activity: Leading Issues provides information and resources on topics that focus on a variety of preventing abuse issues, including child abuse: Child abuse; Family violence; Hate crimes; and School violence.
Select one of these issues for each student to research either the Pro or Con. Organize the students in such a way that all issues and each side of the issues are covered. Use oral reports of two to three minutes for each student to present their reasoned opinion on each issue. Oral reports are an excellent way for students to develop standards-based essential skills. Or teachers may want to create mini-debates using the models provided by SIRS.
Leading Issues provides students and teachers with unique and specially prepared research guides for four types of reports/presentations:
- Formal Research Paper
- Mini-Research Report (student and teacher guides)
- PowerPoint Presentation
- Mini-Debate (student and teacher guides)
Each of these resources is written in a template designed to specifically correlate to the Leading Issues format. In addition, two teacher guides support the Mini-Research and the Mini-Debate student guides.
This makes it easy for teachers and students to work together to manage their analysis, synthesis, and reporting in the mini-research process. Generally, these are the least understood processes in conducting student research activities.
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eLibrary®
How are music and poetry related?
Grades 4-12
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April is National Poetry Month. Poetry is popular with all ages and throughout history.
Some of the best forms of poetry can be found in the lyrics of popular music. Generally this is not used as a resource when students read and write poetry in English classes. Instead, most lesson plans focus on the classical poets that are included in traditional English Language Arts textbooks. This exclusion may result in fewer students appreciating the power and techniques of poetry and the desire to write their own poetry as an art of expression.
Activity: ProQuest editors have created several a BookCarts that help teachers to create assignments that focus on reading, writing, and analyzing poetry.
One of these helps students to study the connection of writing lyrics for music and poetic techniques: “Song Lyrics as Poetry.” This would help high school English Language Arts teachers to get students more motivated in investigating poetic forms and writing some poetry or song lyrics, too.
The new BookCart will contain Essential Questions as well as an ELA learning standard. This model can be copied and then edited to include your own essential questions for critical thinking as well as your state standard. There are additional BookCarts with the topic of poetry in the ProQuest Carts collection of BookCart Editor: Writing Poetry for Fun and Expression; Fun with Poetry; and Power of Poetry.
You can copy this new BookCart and several other poetry models to your local collection using this procedure. Click the English Language Arts folder in ProQuest Carts.
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eLibrary® Elementary
How can I make a difference in protecting the environment?
Grades 3-7
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April 22nd is Earth Day. Teachers have a great opportunity to help students understand major environmental issues and how they can help do their part.
Activity: Here are some activities that can help students get involved:
- Set an example by not littering, no matter where you are.
- Help put the trash out at home and make sure that garbage can lids are on tight, and that all of the trash goes into the can.
- Make litterbags for your car. You can draw environmental friendly pictures on them.
- Keep your yard free of things that can blow into the street and become litter.
- Ask your teacher to take you to a recycling center or landfill to see what happens to trash.
- Write a story about the dangers of pollution to post on your classroom bulletin board.
Students will need to do some research on an environmental issue for their bulletin board story that they write or present to the class. Students should click Science > Earth Science > Environmental Issues to get a list of environmental topics and issues.
You will need to assign each student one of the topics from the list so that each report will be unique and interesting for the other students to hear or view when posted to the class bulletin board.
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CultureGrams™
What’s so important about human diversity and culture?
Grades 5-10
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April is Appreciate Diversity Month. CultureGrams has the resources to help students appreciate the diversity of more than 100 countries. Some of our newest immigrants and the children in school are from these countries.
Sierra Leone’s real GDP per capita is $470, while Luxembourg’s is $53,780. Ten per 1,000 infants die yearly in American Samoa compared to 77 in Pakistan. Statistics, though they don’t tell the whole story about a country, offer helpful tools for tracking demographic and economic trends while comparing countries and regions.
Choose a pair of statistics such as population and Real GDP per capita or literacy and life expectancy. Using the CultureGrams World Edition, look up these statistics for five countries in some of the world’s major regions (Europe, Africa, North America, Caribbean, South America, Asia, Oceania, etc.).
- Create averages from the statistics found in the five CultureGrams for each region.
- Have students draw three histograms. The first should be a comparison of, for example, regional literacy averages; the second, regional life expectancy rates; and the third, a combination of both statistical averages.
- Compare and contrast the first two histograms. Do they share a similar pattern?
- Discuss the third histogram. Does there seem to be any correlation between the two statistics you analyzed? If so, what might be the cause of such a relationship? Might it be mostly coincidental, and if so, what other factors might affect the statistics you chose?
For a more in-depth comparison, students could create a scatter-plot diagram, identify and eliminate countries that are extreme outliers, and recalculate the regional averages.
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eLibrary® Science
Why are Earth Day activities important for students?
Grades 5-12
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The first annual Earth Day celebration began in April of 1970. It was the result of the work and vision of Gaylord Nelson, former senator of Wisconsin, and Denis Hayes, Harvard graduate student.
This year Earth Day occurs on April 22. Earth Day activities are designed to continually remind people of how fragile our environment is, and how we must create laws and actions to protect it. Most of the damage done to the environment results from human activities tied to economic development. These actions often disrupt the vital ecology of natural cycles between all life and the natural resources of the Earth. Preserving these natural cycles is the goal of Earth Day and is necessary to sustain human health and quality of life.
Balancing economic and environmental health has been the focus of many Americans over more than a century. But, more recently some of the best known environmental champions in the U.S. have been Rachel Carson in the 1960s with her concerns about chemical pollution (Silent Spring), to most recently, former Vice-President Al Gore’s concern about global warming (An Inconvenient Truth).
Activity: The BookCart tool provides teachers with an excellent way to customize resources to the needs of their classes, whether their students are Advanced Placement, mainstream, or struggling. Teachers can use a combination of their own judgment and Lexile reading scores to help make these learning resource selections for each BookCart.
ProQuest has already developed models that teachers and librarians can copy to their Local Carts collection to help jump-start the use of BookCarts for inquiry-based science activities. This is important because most teachers and librarians don’t have the time and experience initially to create these BookCart on their own -- just copy and adapt our collection.
Here is a sampling of ProQuest Carts that support Earth Day activities in schools:
- The Carbon Cycle
- Global Warming, Greenhouse Effect, and Climate
- Energy Conservation, and the Environment
- Hurricanes and Global Warming
- Fossil Fuels and Alternative Energy
- Water Pollution and Conservation
- Recycling and Hazardous Materials
Each of these BookCarts provides over 40 resources that students can select from conduct their research. Each has examples of Essential Questions for critical thinking to present a variety of perspectives on the topic for students to consider and form reasoned opinions on the issue. Each has a multiple choice template for teachers to add questions to assess student understanding of facts.
Use this procedure to copy these and other BookCarts into your Local Carts collection. Click the “ProQuest Carts” tab to get to the collection, then click the folder “eLibrary Science -- BookCarts.
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ProQuest® Historical Newspapers
What is the most common drug of choice for teens?
Grades 5-10
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April is Alcohol Awareness Month. The challenge of educating students and the public about the dangers of alcohol abuse continues to be an ongoing challenge for health educators.
There was a time in our history when our government thought that they could stop alcohol abuse by prohibiting the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages. This experiment failed to stop abuse and, in its wake, created and financed a system of organized crime that persists to this day. Clearly this is a classic example of the intended cure being worse than the disease. Or, using another truism, “you can’t legislate morality.”
Activity: ProQuest Historical Newspapers archive allows teachers and students to learn more about Prohibition and the 18th Amendment. The Topic Search tool helps streamline the process of research, especially with primary source documents. ProQuest editors have selected the most significant historical topics and then populated each topic with articles that best represent that topic and that era.
These resources provide a variety of points of view to encourage critical thinking through student engagement. Gone is the frustration and time wasted in searching for and evaluating resources from other sources. Here to stay is the student excitement and added time for working with quality information to express reasoned opinion and build essential literacy skills.
Each student report should focus on Essential Questions for critical thinking. The best essential questions are generated by each teacher with student input. Here are some examples for teachers to use as models for this topic:
- What groups spearheaded the Prohibition movement and why?
- What were some of the reasons that Prohibition failed to achieve its goals?
- How did organized crime benefit through Prohibition?
- What factors were responsible for the repeal of Prohibition and who were the leaders in the repeal?
To access the editor-selected Topic, use this procedure: Click the Topics tab > Roaring ‘20s > Rise of Organized Crime. And click The Great Depression > Constitutional Amendments.
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eLibrary® Curriculum Edition
Have you ever heard the phrase, “you’re a poet, but you don’t know it?”
Grades 7-12
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April is National Poetry Month. Poetry is popular with all ages and throughout history. So, April is a great time to focus students on the reading and writing poetry. The reading and writing of poetry are integrated into state standard at all levels of the English Language Arts curriculum.
ProQuest Learning: Literature Activity: The content and tools of PQLL are particularly suitable for Honors, IB, and AP Literature. Teachers can click Study Units on the main page to explore the robust resources available to help create a variety of mini-research assignments that support the goals of all advanced courses. Students can explore the works and criticism on hundreds of authors and poets that are integral to advanced courses. Or, click Thematic Pages to get a listing of literary themes that include: Romantic Poetry, Tudor Poetry, Metaphysical Poets, and Elizabethan Poetry.
Mainstream Courses in English Language Arts Activity: Editor’s Choice websites provide a variety of information about poets and poetry from around the world. Teachers can click Topics tab to access a topic tree of 20 curriculum-focused topics. Click Literature and then Poetry, then Poetic Forms.
Teachers will now have access to Editor’s Choice websites and relevant documents (a bonus with eLibrary CE) for poetic forms such as Haiku, Ballad, Epic, Ode, Sonnet, and Nursery Rhymes. Teachers can explore resources that connect best with what they are teaching and build a BookCart that focuses the best poetry content customized for their students’ interests and reading levels.
History Study Center Activity: Poetry is associated with many eras in both U. S. history and world history. Students can learn how poetry reflects the values of society during a specific era. Students can also learn how poetry can have the power to motivate people to react to the current issues of that era.
- Type “poets and poetry” in the eLibrary CE Search box
- Note the robust collection of resources in the General Search Results list
- Note the Common topics for Search Results
- Poetry > Reference > Collections; Poetic Forms > Sonnet > Collections; Literature > Poetry > World Poetry
- Click the History tab located at the top next to the General tab
- Art of Poetry; Poetry; Sonnet, Shakespearean
To maximize the potential of research assignments, scientific research indicates that critical thinking must be integrated into each activity. Despite the power of the resources in History Study Center, students will generally look for and use encyclopedia type information.
This type of report usually consists of a summary of facts. The student utilizes copy, paste, techniques from a single source and then adds or replaces a few words or sentences. Such reports require little critical thinking and result in low level learning at best, and are also prone to plagiarism.
The best way to ensure a focused student research process and the integration of critical thinking is for teachers to create engaging, essential questions. These questions require students to analyze and synthesize multiple resources to answer them and include expression of original thought.
The original thought may be expressed through written, oral, or multimedia reports. Here are some sample engaging and essential questions for teachers to consider, create others, and then assign to students:
- Why is poetry such a popular way of expression throughout history?
- What are some of your favorite poems and why?
- How is poetry related to the lyrics of popular songs?
- What is your favorite form of poetry and why?
- Who is your favorite poet and why?
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ProQuest® Platinum
Don’t know a Limerick from Haiku?
Grades 6-12
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April is National Poetry Month and an opportunity for English teachers to have some fun with this genre. Language Arts teachers are always looking for resources and ideas to engage students in the reading and writing of poetry.
Colleges are concerned that students are not prepared to write effectively, especially in expository and persuasive modes. The new SAT is an example how the College Board is providing an incentive for more writing activity to occur across all curriculum areas if this student essential skills deficit is to be addressed.
Scientific research indicates that writing helps students “connect the dots” between their world and the ideas and concepts that are presented in school.
Activity: Writing poetry has and will continue to be powerful means of personal expression. It integrates higher-order thinking and develops language arts skills. And maybe most of all, writing poetry in various forms can be fun whether students are in elementary, middle, or high school.
ProQuest Platinum has a collection of many magazines and journals that support teachers that try to enrich their research assignments so that students learn essential language arts skills and also develop digital information literacy skills. Assign students to research two different styles of poetry, explain the style, and write several stanzas each of these styles.
- Open Platinum and click the Topic Guide tab.
- Type “Poetry Writing Styles” in the Search box then click Search Term button.
Note the following topics: Poetry AND Writing; Poetry AND Teaching; Poetry AND Students; Poetry AND Writing instruction; Poetry AND Creative writing; Writing AND Poetry & poets. Click View Articles to explore articles that are appropriate for your report.
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SIRS® Decades
How do the Vietnam War protests compare with the Iraq War protests?
Grades 7-12
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Forty years ago on April 15, 1967, massive demonstrations were held throughout U.S. against the Vietnam War. Draft cards were burned symbolizing young people’s rejection of the whole premise of the Vietnam War. Protesters turned to unconventional methods to protest and many of these styles evolved into the Hippy Culture of that era.
Recently, a growing number of protests have been organized to demonstrate lack of support for the War in Iraq and its purposes. This has generated the same kind of resentment against President Bush that was demonstrated against President Johnson. However, unlike the Vietnam War, the American public does support our troops both in Iraq and when they come home even though they don’t support the war.
Activity: Locate great information on the Vietnam War and the war protestors of the 60s. Click the 1960 icon > Counterculture and the Peace Movement. Students should also click the 1960 icon > Vietnam War for more resources.
Teachers should assign a variety of essential questions for critical thinking to challenge students to think about how understanding the Vietnam War and its peace movement is similar yet different than the present peace movement and protests against the War in Iraq. These questions will guide students in their choice of resources and ultimately in how they express their reasoned opinions. These questions are examples for teachers to use. Teachers, working with students, are the best judge of the types of questions to use to engage their students in critical thinking about issues.
- What were the reasons for the Vietnam War and how do they compare with Iraq?
- How are the protests about the Vietnam War similar and different than Iraq?
- How were the attitudes of American at home different about Vietnam than Iraq?
- How were attitudes toward President Johnson the same as President Bush and why?
- How were concerns about not winning in Vietnam similar to those involving Iraq?
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SIRS Discoverer®
Why is environmental education so important?
Grades 4-7
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April 22 is Earth Day, while April 29 is Arbor Day. Environmental activities are extremely popular with students in K-8.
So, with two environmental themes, April provides a bonanza for teacher to get students involved with learning more about the environment and how students can be proactive in protecting it.
Recently, an environmental issue has been given the world stage through the work of Al Gore and his Academy Award wining documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” However, there are many other issues that students will want to study and report on as well.
Activity: To access a variety of subjects that focus on environmentalism, use this procedure: Click the Environment subject tree icon and have students select, or the teacher assign, from this list of Topics/subtopics:
- Careers--Working with or to Save & Protect the Environment
- Conservation of Natural Resources
- Energy
- Environmental Health
- Environmental Law
- Environmentalists
- Garbage Disposal & Recycling
- Global Warming & Greenhouse Effect
- Pesticides & Poisons
- Pollution
Two-minute oral reports on a variety of topics will provide an opportunity for student reports to be unique, beneficial to other students, and develop essential presentation skills. Students should select at least two resources for their reports.
They should be encouraged to create a visual such as a poster or PowerPoint slide show if appropriate. Essential questions help focus students in their research and in how they express their reasoned opinion in their reports/presentations. Here are some examples to share with students. Teachers may want to add or substitute their own:
- What is the environmental problem or problems addressed by this topic?
- How do these problems cause damage to the environment?
- What are some examples of harm that affects the student’s life?
- What can be done to help cure the problem and protect the environment?
- Who may be hurt by any new actions that the student supports?
- How can the student directly support environmentalism in their school, home, and community?
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