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.
Create Your Own Civilization Project Each year, my students created their own civilization to mirror what we were learning about Rome, China, India, and beyond.
Beware “Real World Problems” Why I stopped looking for “real world” problems and started aiming for “interesting.” The real world is often tedious and annoying. Interesting never is!
Phrases to Open Up a Discussion (Lunar Survival Skills Part 2) One of my favorite open-ended, creative activities becomes even better with careful phrasing on my part. These three questions will help you be the facilitator of a discussion, rather than the authority.
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.
Don’t Jump Straight to “Create”! When we jump from "this kid likes board games" straight to "I'll have them create a new board game", we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here's how to scaffold a truly creative task.
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.
Create A Holiday Take students beyond the decorations and ask them to identify what a holiday reveals about a culture's values. Then, push them further as they develop their own holidays.
Upgrading Questions with Key Words How adding a single "key word" can upgrade your questions to a whole new level.
Create A Civilization: The River Most humans want to live near fresh water, which means that most civilizations settled near a river! Let's add a river to your students' civilizations.
