Welcome to this month's issue of ProQuest Teachable Moments. This issue focuses on Women's History Month, health, space exploration, and crafts.
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.
March is a month dedicated to multiple themes that focus on maintaining health and preventing and controlling diseases: National Nutrition Month; Mental Retardation Awareness; National Kidney Month; and Workplace Safety and Health.
Activity: SIRS Leading Issues (found in SIRS Researcher) provides teachers and students with the resources to better understand the issues involved in the development of medicines, medical procedures, and access to health care.
AIDS
Animal experimentation
Assisted suicide
Bioethics
Birth control
Cloning
Genetic Engineering
Health Care Reform
Human Cloning
Medical Ethics
Obesity
Stem Cells
Select one of these issues for each student to research, focusing on the pros or cons of each enduring topic. Organize 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.
Leading Issues provides students and teachers with unique and specially prepared research guides for four types of reports/presentations, including formal research paper, mini-research report, Powerpoint presentation, and mini-debate. 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 analysis, synthesis, and reporting, generally the least understood processes in conducting student research activities.
Find out more about SIRS Researcher and SIRS Leading Issues at our K-12 website.
Eighty years ago in March of 1926, the first liquid-fuel rocket took to the air. It was launched by Dr. Robert H. Goddard in a Massachusetts cabbage patch. The rocket flew less than three seconds and reached an altitude of 41 feet. This was the flight that heralded the start of the space age.
Previous rockets used black powder that required the oxygen of the atmosphere for them to burn. How would such rockets fly beyond the stratosphere where they would have no oxygen? Liquid fuels provided the answer because they would contain their own oxygen source within the fuel.
Dr. Goddard moved to New Mexico and its open spaces to develop and test his rockets. Over the next nine years his rockets grew from 12 to 18 feet, and their altitude climbed from 2,000 to 9,000 feet. He built a rocket that exceeded the speed of sound, and another with fin-stabilized steering. He filed dozens of patents for everything from gyroscopic guidance systems to multistage rockets.
Goddard’s pioneering work led to the development of the rockets that launched the space age with sputnik, the first moon landing, and today, the exploration of the Mars and the farthest reaches of our solar system.
Activity:ExploreLearning Gizmos provide a way for students to understand more about the exploration of space made possible by the work of Dr. Goddard.
March is National Crafts Month. All students enjoy expressing their creativity in a variety of ways. Arts and craft activities let students do this by helping them to create tangible products that express beauty and utility--or just plain fun things to do or make.
Let Reading A-Z power student creativity this month in your school!
Levels aa-J We Build
We Can Make Sounds
We Make Cookies
Tools
We Make a Snowman
A Clown Face
Glassblowing
How Many Rhymes?
Soup and a Sandwish
Let’s Make Shapes
Levels K-Z Going to the Art Museum
All About Kites
Sign Language and Hand Talk
Art Around Us
Puppets
Making Rice
Li’s Tangram Animals
The 100th Day Project
The Art of Photography
The celebration of Women’s History Month in March recognizes the continuing struggle by women in the U.S. and the world for equity. Notable events mark the successful struggle for equity in voting, employment and careers, salaries and benefits, reproductive rights, education, athletics, and public accommodations. Today’s students should appreciate past successes, and support the efforts that still remain.
Teacher Activity: ProQuest has created a Bookcart of learning resources for students to use in researching information in celebration of Women’s History Month. You can copy this Bookcart to your local site (and 400 other models) using the following procedure:
Type Gender Equity-Issues and Heroines in the Title box.
Type PQ-CT Bookcart in the Author box.
Click the Select box to the right of the Title, then click Copy.
Type Women’s History in the Title box and PQ Bookcart in the Author box.
Repeat step 5.
Click the Back to Bookcarts link at the top.
The new Bookcarts will be part of your collection, and ready for student use.
Now that you have copied these Bookcarts, you may want to explore and have your librarian copy additional Bookcarts to your local site.
All the Bookcarts on this list can be copied to the local library site in less than 10 minutes. Librarians can get teachers started on mini-research activities immediately. Teachers will be impressed by the wealth of curriculum and technology integration support provided by Bookcarts.
To view a Flash demo outlining the copying process, click here.
Student Activity: When students use the Bookcart, be sure they look in the Description box. The box contains examples of engaging essential questions (EQ) that address the need for critical thinking in mini-research projects. Teachers may want to add more because the resources in the Bookcart are broad enough to warrant this. Here are the questions from the Bookcart example:
EQ: Why have women been treated as second-class citizens throughout U.S. history?
EQ: How have women contributed to progress both before and after suffrage?
EQ: What issue do women have today that address gender equity and why?
Students should select at least three issues common to women’s history and the struggle for equity for their reports: voting, health, reproductive rights, marriage rights, contractual right, employment rights, equal pay rights, etc. See this guide for models for mini-research reports.
Health and fitness can be affected by a variety of forces, including environment, diet, living conditions, literacy, and access to health care. Teach your students the difference between communicable and non-communicable diseases and discuss which of the above forces might contribute to each.
Then, using CultureGrams World Edition, assign students to read the following sections in a variety of country reports: Land and Climate, Diet, Recreation, Education, and Health. Choose an example or two of communicable and non-communicable diseases (i.e. heart disease, cancer, obesity and AIDS, malaria, TB) and discuss them in light of the country sections you assigned:
What cultural forces contribute to the development of both communicable and non-communicable diseases in these countries?
How could they be prevented and what holds people back from implementing these changes?
As a class, decide on one way students might be able to help fight disease in another country. Ideas might include donating money as a class to a health-related charity, collecting scarce medical supplies and sending them to a hospital in the class’s country of choice, etc.
Did you know that eLibrary now contains more than 400 model Bookcarts created for teachers? Using these Bookcarts can make life easier for teachers and students and save valuable classroom time.
Our Bookcarts contain more than 25 digital articles, graphics, websites, and relevant publications so that students can search with confidence that all resources support the same standards-based topics and issues that they study in their textbooks.
Another great feature of these Bookcarts is that they all contain examples of Essential Questions (EQ) for Critical Thinking. The examples help teachers to create even more EQs to direct students to solve a different problem or address a different issue inherent in the topic of study. This means that each student will need to find and use multiple resources in the Bookcart for their research, reducing plagiarism. Another new feature in each Bookcart is the multiple-choice Quiz Template for teachers to use to create short quizzes that direct and help assess student reading assignments for content knowledge.
All of these Bookcarts are freely available for downloading to your local collection. Here’s a list of the available Bookcarts that can be copied and shared by teachers at your school.
Ask your librarian for support in copying these or use this link to our Flash tutorial. Scroll down to Copying the ProQuest Collection.
Science is a core academic subject that has recently received much attention and been promoted nationally by President Bush. International testing in science has shown that U.S. students are near the bottom of the achievement scores in the science and math competition. Many governors have made science education the major focus of education in the state to help develop the growth of technology businesses and jobs.
These Bookcarts provide professionally selected resources to save science students valuable time in searching, evaluating relevancy and authority. They also saves teachers time in supervising surfing as they would have to do when student surf for Internet or print resources. Students can keep Bookcart resources current by searching from within the Bookcart using the selected Publication search.
Here are some examples of quality science Bookcarts:
Science Teacher Resources
Professional Development
All
It may be difficult for students in elementary school to appreciate the many notable American women who led the long struggle for equity and civil rights that they will enjoy during their lifetimes. Mini-research activities provide an excellent way for students to discover the struggles and accomplishments of these women.
Activity: Assign a notable woman from the list that is available in eLibrary Elementary.
Click the Topics search tab.
Click Biographies of Women.
Assign a mini-research activity from the following categories:
Government
American First Ladies
Government Leaders & Politicians
Literature
Women Writers by Alphabet
Women's Rights Leaders
General Collections of Female Activists
Science & Medicine
Featured Biographies
Sports
Collections
Summarize the assigned woman using the following Essential Questions to organize the report:
What period of time did this women live?
What was this woman’s childhood and education like?
What did this woman do that is so important to others?
What struggles did this woman have to go through to succeed?
How did what this woman do help the cause of all women?
To celebrate Women’s History Month, students may want to find out more about the women whose ideas and struggles lead the way to many of the rights that woman enjoy today. Working with primary sources such as those in Historical Newspapers is recommended by the College Board for all college-prep students and is required for Advanced Placement courses for U.S. History and Government.
The new Topic search tool makes it easy for students to get collections of primary source articles on every major topic and subtopic in U.S. history books and state standards content benchmarks, including Women’s History.
Activity: Use the Topic Search to locate the following topics and subtopics that focus on major eras in the struggle for gender equity:
Topic: Subtopic
Progressive Era: Women and Progressivism
The Roaring 20s: Societal Issues
The Seventies: Feminism
World War II: Women and Minorities in WWII
Post-War America: Popular Culture & Domestic Life
The Clinton Years: The Growth in Women’s Sports
Assign students a different era to research. Have students deliver their reports orally for three minutes. This sharing of knowledge also provides opportunities for students to learn essential and standards-based communications skills.
Here are some examples of Essential Questions for teachers to assign so students can integrate critical thinking into their reports:
What were the major forms of discrimination against women in this era?
Why do you think that this practice was in place then?
Who were some of the women and the issues of discrimination in this era?
What strategies did women use to make progress during this era and why?
This month's eLibrary CE teaching ideas center on two integrated learning solutions: History Study Center™ and ProQuest® Learning Literature.
History Study Center™
The celebration of Women’s History Month in March recognizes the continuing struggle by women for equity. It's hard to believe, but less than 100 years have passed since women were empowered with the vote. Other notable events mark the successful struggle for equity in employment and careers, salaries and benefits, reproductive rights, education, athletics, and public accommodations.
Today’s students must not assume that the struggle is over. They must appreciate the past successes and support the efforts that still remain.
Activity: To start the mini-research activity, type Women’s History in the Quick Search box. The following U.S. history topic options will be available to students:
Women in America, 1919-
Women in America, 1776-1918
Women during the two World Wars
Women in colonial America
Votes for women
The history of Hispanic Americans, 1920-
Education in the United States
Women and the American Civil War
Women and the American Revolution
American feminism
Assign one or more students to research one of the general topics listed above. Each student will examine the issues of women’s role during that period, their rights, their struggle for equity, and the notable heroines that distinguished themselves during that period of time.
Teachers should consider integrating critical thinking skills into all research assignments. Despite the power of the resources in History Study Center, students will generally provide information that is mostly summary and encyclopedic. This type of mini-research is noted for the technique of copy, paste, and then replace a few words or sentences to create the final report. At best there is little real learning and very little development of critical thinking skills.
The best way to ensure student focus and critical thinking is for teachers to create engaging and Essential Questions. These questions require students to analyze and synthesize multiple resources to answer with an 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 and assign to students:
Who was the best example of a woman who provided leadership during the time period, what were her accomplishments, and why did you select her?
What were some examples of the specific strategies women used to gain power and equity and which was the most important?
What were the predominant reasons that women lacked equality and why was this so?
What are the most important issues of gender equity that remain today and why?
ProQuest® Learning: Literature
Following on the heels of Black History Month in February, in March students will be motivated to learn more about minority women who have become famous for their works and who have written about similar themes.
Activity: Teachers can assign students to research a variety of authors and their works and report back to the class. Each student should research a different author from the categories of Asian-American, African-American, and Hispanic-American women authors.
Two or three minute oral reports should provide information about the biography, the most notable works, and the general criticism of these works by the literary community.
Type Asian-American women authors in the Quick Search box.
Click More below the listing of five authors to expand the list to ten.
Note: each student should select and summarize one of these authors.
Repeat this search process for Hispanic-American and African-American women authors.
A major purpose of Women’s History Month is to reaffirm the appreciation of women leaders in the past that have helped to gain voting and other rights for women today.
Activity: Students should research varying topics that will provide a comprehensive understanding of the women’s rights movement. Here are some examples for teachers to assign. Teachers may also want to add other examples:
Women and employment rights
Women and voting rights
Women and health rights
Women and education rights
Women and athletic rights
Each of these terms can be used for a Topics search by students. When students get the next set of subtopics after the initial search, they should click the best subtopic from the list and then click the View Document link.
To ensure that students use critical thinking skills to create their reports, teachers need to create engaging and Essential Questions to provide focus and motivate original thought. Here are some examples of essential questions for critical thinking that students should try to answer about their subtopic for the mini-research report:
Why were women discriminated in this area civil rights?
Who were some of the women that created breakthroughs?
What were some of the strategies that women use to create these breakthroughs?
The celebration of Women’s History Month in March recognizes the continuing struggle by women in the U.S. and the world for equity. Today’s students must not assume that the struggle is over. They must appreciate past successes and support the efforts that still remain.
Activity: The struggle for women’s rights is featured through special topics in each decade.
Click the 1910 icon > Women’s Suffrage
Click the 1920 icon > Women
Click the 1940 icon > Women
Click the 1960 icon > Sexual Revolution
Click the 1970 icon > Gender Equality and Sexuality
Click the 1980 icon > Immigration, Race, and Gender
Teachers should assign a separate decade to students to provide a variety of information that can be shared with the class in two to three minute oral reports.
Here are some examples of the Essential Questions that teachers may assign to students for these oral reports:
Why were women discriminated against in this decade?
What kind of strategies did women use to create a breakthrough?
Who were some of the women leaders and what did they do?
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ProQuest offers a growing family of K-12 classroom-focused,
subscription-based online research tools. Many of these education solutions offer reading level-linked
(lexile) content, support
21st-century information
literacy skills, and help schools differentiate instruction across all curriculum areas.
Learn more about all of our tools here, tap into our training resources and videos, and don't miss our new eLibrary research tool (more). We also have a pair of special resource pages just for teachers (with lesson plans) and librarians.
March is a month dedicated to multiple themes that focus on maintaining health and preventing and controlling diseases: National Nutrition Month; Mental Retardation Awareness; National Kidney Month; and Workplace Safety and Health.
Eighty years ago in March of 1926, the first liquid-fuel rocket took to the air. It was launched by Dr. Robert H. Goddard in a Massachusetts cabbage patch. The rocket flew less than three seconds and reached an altitude of 41 feet. This was the flight that heralded the start of the space age.
March is National Crafts Month. All students enjoy expressing their creativity in a variety of ways. Arts and craft activities let students do this by helping them to create tangible products that express beauty and utility--or just plain fun things to do or make.
The celebration of Women’s History Month in March recognizes the continuing struggle by women in the U.S. and the world for equity. Notable events mark the successful struggle for equity in voting, employment and careers, salaries and benefits, reproductive rights, education, athletics, and public accommodations. Today’s students should appreciate past successes, and support the efforts that still remain.
Health and fitness can be affected by a variety of forces, including environment, diet, living conditions, literacy, and access to health care. Teach your students the difference between communicable and non-communicable diseases and discuss which of the above forces might contribute to each.
Did you know that eLibrary now contains more than 400 model Bookcarts created for teachers? Using these Bookcarts can make life easier for teachers and students and save valuable classroom time.
It may be difficult for students in elementary school to appreciate the many notable American women who led the long struggle for equity and civil rights that they will enjoy during their lifetimes. Mini-research activities provide an excellent way for students to discover the struggles and accomplishments of these women.
To celebrate Women’s History Month, students may want to find out more about the women whose ideas and struggles lead the way to many of the rights that woman enjoy today. Working with primary sources such as those in Historical Newspapers is recommended by the College Board for all college-prep students and is required for Advanced Placement courses for U.S. History and Government.
The celebration of Women’s History Month in March recognizes the continuing struggle by women for equity. It's hard to believe, but less than 100 years have passed since women were empowered with the vote. Other notable events mark the successful struggle for equity in employment and careers, salaries and benefits, reproductive rights, education, athletics, and public accommodations.
Following on the heels of Black History Month in February, in March students will be motivated to learn more about minority women who have become famous for their works and who have written about similar themes.
A major purpose of Women’s History Month is to reaffirm the appreciation of women leaders in the past that have helped to gain voting and other rights for women today.
The celebration of Women’s History Month in March recognizes the continuing struggle by women in the U.S. and the world for equity. Today’s students must not assume that the struggle is over. They must appreciate past successes and support the efforts that still remain.
Throughout the month of March, help your young students learn more about their health and preventing and controlling diseases.
