 TCI eNewsSummer Edition June 2007 In this issue:
We like to stay fresh at teachtci.com by updating our website site regularly with new content. Our most recent round of updates includes a revamped Teacher to Teacher dropdown menu on the top of the front page. In it, you will find some exciting new menu items to try, including:
Although not new on the menu--think of these are our classic staples--you will find links to impact reports highlighting research on the effects of using TCI materials in the classroom and valuable information about funding sources. You will also find links to TCI's four discussion groups where you can join educators from around the country in four virtual teachers' lounges, each with its own theme. And last, but by no means least, you can link to Bert's blog where you can share your educational musings with TCI's Founder, CEO, and President, himself a teacher--more on that below.
Coming soon from TCI is our exciting new high school program, History Alive! Pursuing American Ideals, which has just gone to press after months of hard work by our development team. This innovative program uses the acclaimed TCI Approach to engage students in the study of the five founding ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence: equality, rights, liberty, opportunity, and democracy.
One of the unique features of History Alive! Pursuing American Ideals is a writing program that is interwoven throughout the lessons. This program-within-a-program presents carefully structured and sequenced writing assignments to help students build the skills they need to write clear, cogent, and compelling essays. To make the assignments more fun for students, we created a variety of writing activities--from letters, to political commentaries, to formal essays. Plus, because students' abilities vary, the program provides a Writing Toolkit to help you support writing instruction when you feel it is needed. For more information about History Alive! Pursuing American Ideals, visit the product description on the TCI website, or request a copy of our Program Preview today by contacting TCI's Customer Support at 800-497-6138 or support@teachtci.com. Next to come fast and furious from TCI is another high school program: Government Alive! Power, Politics, and You. This amazingly innovative program, will allow you to transform your classroom into a laboratory for democracy, helping students learn about the structure and function of government at the local, state, and federal levels. A Program Preview will be available in September and information about fall professional development offerings for the program will be posted online in the coming months--keep checking our events calendar for more details. Our intrepid leader--Founder, CEO and President, Bert Bower--spends much of his time "on tour" making presentations to teachers about TCI curricular materials. A teacher himself, he likes nothing better than to talk to other teachers about their work, what's going on in the classroom, and how TCI can help teachers better reach all students. Although Bert's travels take him far and wide, he can't be everywhere he would like to be, and he has to be in the office at least some of the time. So he has created a blog as a way for him to communicate with teachers throughout the country and stay in touch.
In his latest blog, Bert muses on the winds of change in high school social studies teaching. Since returning to the high school classroom to develop TCI's soon-to-be-released program History Alive! Pursuing American Ideals, he sees more and more high school teachers open to active social studies teaching--a different world to the one he remembers from his days as a high school teacher in the 1980s. He's very encouraged by these changes but is still trying to understand this new climate and asks, "Are you seeing high school instruction changing?" Join in the conversation and share your insights, Bert would be thrilled to hear from you. Wouldn't it make your day to hear that statement from one of your students? Challenging students to view history from multiple perspectives, to empathize with historical figures and relate remote events to their own lives are goals of many social studies teachers. Shellie Shipley has made strides toward achieving these goals using TCI materials in her unique classroom environment.
 Shellie teaches at the Arizona School for the Deaf in Tucson. Her high school students often struggle learning to read and write and rely solely on American Sign Language to communicate. Appealing to the non-linguistic intelligences in her students has helped Shellie achieve great success. "My students are kinesthetic, visual learners," Shellie says, "They loved the Tug of War lesson (The Revolutionary War from History Alive! America's Past) and the Social Studies Skill Builder on slavery. They told me, 'I feel what it felt like. I never thought of it that way before.'" She added, "We had a great class discussion after that lesson."To learn more about Shellie's classroom and her path to implementing the TCI Approach in her classroom, read the complete Breaking News story. |
Links to sample lessons/chapters for all of TCI's programs--TCI Tapas, if you like (to keep with our menu theme). Each sampler includes relevant pages from the Lesson Guide, student materials, and reproducible masters--everything you need to try the featured lesson in your classroom. Visit the 
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