Located on 59 acres of floodplain in southeast Raleigh, the Walnut Creek Wetlands Center is now open to the public. The Center provides a unique opportunity for visitors to see the plants and animals of a wetland in an urban setting. Low cost programs are available to teach “the importance of wetlands, wildlife habitats, hydrology, natural ecosystems, and human interactions with the natural environment.”

Educators can find more information about the Center in LEARN NC’s Discover NC section. Also check out the field guide, “Walnut Creek: A Guide to Exploring Urban Wetlands” created by Exploris Middle School Students. Over the course of a year, the students investigated the wetlands. Using cameras and waterproof journals, they recorded everything they saw and experienced, from tracks made by raccoons and coyotes to the lowliest leopard slugs and sea lampreys. They presented their work to the city of Raleigh in 2008 to be placed in the new Walnut Creek Wetlands Center. LEARN NC is proud to be able to bring this work to you on our site in PDF format.

North Carolina Maps is a comprehensive, online collection of historic maps of the Tar Heel State. Featuring maps from three of the state’s largest map collections — the North Carolina State Archives, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Outer Banks History Center — North Carolina Maps provides an unprecedented level of access to these materials. North Carolina Maps contains more than 2,000 maps, ranging in date from the late 1500s to 2000, and including detailed maps for each of North Carolina’s one hundred counties.

North Carolina Maps’ K-12 section is devoted to helping teachers use the interactive maps included in the database. Included in this section are essays instructing teachers on how to incorporate maps into the classroom, an illustrated history of maps of North Carolina, and dozens of lesson plans using the maps on the site. The lesson plans span all age groups from kindergarten to twelfth grade and every core subject from environmental science to U.S. history. Math teachers can even teach algebra using a map lesson plan!

One of the site’s most popular lesson plans is the eighth-grade lesson “Webquest: Building an Historic District.” In this lesson, students explore the city of Oxford using overlay maps that switch from 1882 to the present day, and they can find where local schools, grocery stores, and movie theaters were located.

Blog post provided by Jennifer Job, Documenting the American South/UNC Libraries

This week, our Special Education blog looks at classroom management. By being proactive and consistent and by collaborating with other adults, teachers can maintain a positive classroom environment.

We’ve just published a comprehensive guide to the writing process, from pre-writing and preliminary research through formatting and publishing. The guide is presented as a series of articles that use discussion, examples, and suggested resources to help you guide students through any writing assignment.

“A Writing Process” breaks the work down into a series of manageable tasks, which can make assignments seem more approachable to reluctant writers. The articles suggest pre-writing strategies, explore the process of writing thesis statements, discuss ways of using graphic organizers to map out ideas, share resources for evaluating the credibility of online sources, and more.

A North Carolina Humanities Council’s Teachers Institute, with experts from the Cherokee and Lumbee tribes, developed this comprehensive guide to help North Carolina educators teach their students about North Carolina’s Indians and their history. The guide, “Teaching about North Carolina American Indians,” is now available on LEARN NC’s website.

The rich heritage of North Carolina’s American Indians is presented though best practice articles, webliographies of resources that can be found in print and online, and lesson plans for 4th and 8th grades that help educators teach about the Cherokee, the Lumbee, and other tribes of our state. Teachers will also find downloadable audio files on Cherokee language and folklore, along with guides to using them in the classroom. In addition, the Lumbee English is addressed through a dialect dictionary and quiz created by the renowned North Carolina State University linguist professor, Dr. Walt Wolfram.

If you missed LEARN NC’s Fall Interactive Conference on October 1, we’ve posted video archives from all the afternoon sessions. Nine sessions in total cover project-based learning; professional development; fun, free tools for the classroom; and more content designed to save you time and help you teach more effectively.

The videos also feature a replay of the ongoing live chat. This online conversation includes supplemental links, resources, and insights from LEARN NC staff members and educators from around North Carolina — and around the country.

All session archives will open in Adobe Connect. For more information about Adobe Connect software, please see the technical requirements section of the “Details for Virtual Participants” page.

LEARN NC Fall Interactive Conference 2009 — Session archives

The most recent post on our blog Special Education: Telling Facts from Fiction takes a look at pacing guides and asks whether they’re effective when dealing with students who have disabilities.

Looking for resources to mark Columbus Day in your classroom? Our digital textbook for North Carolina history puts the state’s past in national and global context, so check out our chapters on Spanish Exploration (including discussions of how Columbus found his way, what happened after, and an aborted attempt by the Spanish to conquer what is now North Carolina) and the Columbian Exchange.

On a personal note, does anybody else find that these sorts of observances just sneak up on them? This is my way of apologizing for not posting something last week. If you leave a comment and tell me what observance or holiday you have the most trouble finding resources for, I’ll see what we can pull together.

Check out the latest post on our new blog, Special Education: Telling Facts from Fiction, which analyzes the claim that teaching to students’ preferred learning styles will increase academic success.

LEARN NC’s new blog, Special Education: Telling Facts from Fiction, examines common misconceptions about students with learning and behavioral problems. The latest post extends an ongoing discussion about student-teacher ratios: What benefits do students experience with an increased student-teacher ratio? What strategies can a teacher use to achieve these same benefits given the realities of most classrooms? How can teachers encourage the success of students with special needs in inclusion classrooms?

Check out the new post, “Student-teacher ratio: Part II,” and join the conversation!