Pro vs. Con

I love to do this activity when we have 5 minutes left before lunch. The kids get into pairs -one takes the pro side and one the con side and then I assign them a topic to debate.

The catch is they have to give a reason for their argument. That's actually the purpose of this exercise-it's critical thinking, but also being able to verbalize their reasoning. This is typically hard especially for the younger kiddos because they are used to just saying it's right, not necessarily why it's right. Each student talks for about 1 minute, the other gets a turn for 1 minute; and we come back together and share some of our insights.

A few topics we've used so far this year:

1) A shark would/would not make a good pet.
2) Girls should/should not be allowed to be President of the US.
3) Money is/isn't the most important thing.
4)  Students should/should not be able to make their own rules.
5) Aliens really do/don't exist (my kids are obsessed with aliens this year, I don't know if they were watching Falling Skies all summer like I was or what :).

If you try this and it doesn't work at first, don't give up. It takes time for them to have the confidence even to think this way. But I really think it helps in the long run. They know how to justify their reasoning when it comes to writing or eventually open-ended test responses.

Adding Rigor to Halloween Activities

Just a few activities to spice up your Halloween theme with some challenges:

1) Ethics: are spiders/bats/monsters good or bad, why?

2) Changes over time-from pumpkin seed to jack o'lantern

3) What are the rules for making jack o'lanterns? Being a scarecrow? Being a monster (did this activity with my kiddos last week, will post the pics-I loved some of their responses!).

4) Perspective of a spider compared to that of other insects (I realize spiders aren't technically insects, but they do eat them), perspective of a scarecrow, an owl compared to that of a bat, pumpkin in a pumpkin patch compared to that of a jack o'lantern.

5) Scarecrow for the 21st Century-invent a new way to keep crows away from crops

6) Where did the idea for making jack o'lanterns come from? Why pumpkins? Theorize a creative reason. Create a new symbol for Halloween.

For Fall Activities:

1) What would happen if there was no fall season?
2) Ethics: is it right or wrong for the leaves to fall off the trees
3) Perspective of a leaf in the tree compared to that on the ground.
4) Changes for a leaf over time
5) Theorize a creative reason: why do the leaves change color?
6) Rules for the changing leaves
7) New uses for fallen leaves-what could we use them for?

Halloween Perspectives

Since the kids are allowed to wear their costumes to class for Halloween, we give it a little twist. I ask the students to choose literary characters (and yes, I give in to have that include superheroes, comic books are a form of literature :). They write a few lines from the perspective of that character: how do they feel, what do they believe, wish for, etc. Then we present it to their parents. This not only helps us develop that perspective concept, but also helps them get practice being good speakers. We discovered that's a talent that doesn't necessarily come naturally. They talk to their toes, twirl their hair, look up in the sky... typical nervous behaviors. But by the end of the week many had developed eye contact, learned to stand still and some even to project their voices a little bit.

The Runaway Pumpkin

I love this story because we can talk about thinking bubbles and patterns in the rhyming. The pumpkin gets away and the family all try to stop it while thinking about all the different foods they could make out of the pumpkin. The farmer ends up digging a hole with his tractor to stop it.

I asked the kiddos to come up with their own "pumpkin trap". Here are a few examples of what they came up with:

I would catch it with some vines.

The Important Book

One of our icons of Depth and Complexity is "Big Idea". I think this book is a perfect example of looking for the big idea of things. It talks about what is important about different objects and I asked the kids to think deeply about this and come up with some of their own.

Ethics and Wild Things

Where the Wild Things Are is one of my top 10 favorite stories. I love the complexity of it and the way Sendak plays with imagination. Anyway, since we are working on the concept of ethics, the students wrote about their opinion of the characters in the story. Who was right and who was wrong?

Getting Students Out of the Box

I know it's a cliched saying but I speak to my kids often about thinking outside the box. I thought about that a lot this past week with the passing of Steve Jobs and how many people must have thought he was crazy to even suggest a new way to manage music (among other things). I saw this political cartoon and thought how amazing that technology is considered today:

Anyway, I know that these kids are our future visionaries and with all the bubble-filling standardized education they will have to endure throughout their academic careers; one of my many goals for them is to have that foundation in creative thinking. I told my class last year about a billboard I just LOVED for the station fx--their tagline was "There is no box."  So far outside the box that there isn't even a box anymore. That class just ate it up. My kids used to quote it all the time. When I reminded them to "think outside the box"-they'd repeat back "there is no box".

Let's just say it's always a work in progress. Today I felt like I should be featured on the show "When Good Lessons Go Bad". I tried an exercise in creative thinking where they use a leaf to create something. Now we've done divergent art before with squiggly lines-so this shouldn't have been much of a stretch. And it's been successful with previous classes, i.e.  :

divergent leaves

This group is still safe inside their box. Many of the kids turned their leaf into.....a leaf! Some made it a tree, which at least was a little more creative. At one point I had a very Homer Simpson d'oh moment when one of the kids came up with a picture they had drawn in one hand and the leaf in the other asking what she was supposed to do with the leaf. *sigh* There were a few that I really liked:

In any case, we'll keep working on it. Creativity can be tough nut sometimes.