Multiple Perspectives Gone Mad!! Yes, I actually gave my students this question: "How could two experts’ 👓 perspectives regarding information from this reading selection differ from one another?" yikes.
From Silent Reading To Creating Art I've been continuing the idea to explore classic music during silent reaing, and incorporated Gustav Holsts' "The Planets." My students, who have an affinity for memorizing gods and goddesses, took a special interest in this idea. I figured, let's see how far their interests will take us?
Get Students Out Of Creative Ruts Sometimes students need a little structure to force them into a more creative state of mind. Here are a few ideas for interesting writing prompts
Curiosity Skill: Encouraging Students to Ask Other Students If you want to make a massive change in the culture of your classroom, move from teachers asking students all of the questions to students asking each other questions!
Synthesize: Make A Change, Explain The Effect I love the term "Synthesize" from the classic Bloom's Taxonomy, but it can be hard to know exactly what it looks like. My favorite "Synthesize Recipe" is to ask students to make a change to existing content and then explain the effects of that change to me.
Start A Lesson With A Music Video I love collecting intriguing images and videos – things that stop me in my tracks and pique my curiosity. I always figure that if it fascinates me, students would probably be interested also. Often, these visuals work as wonderful hooks for a lesson you need to teach.
Tickling Curiosity Let's look at a way to encourage and scaffold curiosity in our classes using a "Book of Unanswered Questions." Begin by sharing intriguing objects or images and asking your own questions. Give kids a chance to find answers to their questions. Then encourage students to bring in their own intriguing conversation starters. Finally, move students towards curriculum based questions.
An Academic Twist on Valentines Want to have some February fun? Let's merge the idea of "going together like milk and cookies" with curriculum to create Academic Valentine's Day cards!
Thinking Hats and Lunar Survival Skills How Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats helped me solve a problem with my favorite group discussion task.
First Levels: Sentence Starters As silly as it may sound, providing sentence stems or "fill in the blanks" can give your kids the scaffold they need to achieve a higher level of success.
