The Teacher Toolbox

Over the last few years I’ve become very interested in creative process. What is it that enables some people to have an amazing output of creative ideas? How can we teach ‘creativity’? Can we truly teach creativity? Am I creative or am I doing what creative people do?

One of my favourite creativity tools is the SCAMPER Process. I particularly like to play around with the ‘Substitute’ & ‘Combine’ part of the process to produce ‘creative’ pieces of work.

In my ‘Dora Meets Sigmund’ comic I’ve ‘Substituted’: Comic Life for paper, digital photographs for drawings as well as ‘Combining’ Dora from my daughter’s doll house & Freud from my workspace. The dialog comes from ‘Combining’ aspects of a joke my cousin and I had via email. Thanks cuz!!!

Try a little SCAMPER yourself, you’ll be amazed with what you come up with.

In a school day where do we inspire our students to truly wonder?

In my experience once people read this thought very few go out and actively incorporate deep thinking and question raising into their classrooms?

Just Do It

Today I finished off my collection of ‘Head’ questions relating to author’s intention and purpose.

Feel free to print them out and slip them into the pigeon holes of those who you think can use them.

cheers

Adrian

Three level guides (also known as the ‘Here, Hidden, Head’ reading comprehension strategy) are a huge part of my group reading sessions with students.

I’ve had the ‘here’ questions stems available on my website for a while now and recently I’ve had a few emails requesting the ‘head’ stems. So here they are! I’ve just uploaded a collection of thinking stems that focus on character.

The question stems are now available for download as a Word or Acrobat file over on my site.

cheers

Adrian

Here is a pdf version of my ‘Mind Map on Mind Mapping’

I’ve found the quality of student mind maps improves greatly if they use this as a model.

cheers

Adrian

Hi All,

We have a saying in my circle of friends that… ‘Assumption is the mother of all #@*# ups’. The saying works on so many levels… school, classroom, dealing with management, dealing with systems administrators and many other facets of ‘the real world’.

That said, I must admit that I’ve never one to hide my ignorance… so I need to confess that I made an assumption last week that contributed to a little inefficiency. I assumed that teachers and students knew that there are a variety of web search tools available on the Internet that make certain purposes more efficient. i.e. finding the best Science and Maths sites on the Internet is much easier in a child friendly search engine rather than the, ‘Search Engine of Default’.

All that said, last week I took a step back and introduced the teachers and students to a variety of child friendly search engines. The feedback from the teachers was great as they didn’t know these resources existed and the results that the students achieved was very good as they used tools more appropriate to the task.

Let us hope that everyone can now transfer this learning to search tasks that they conduct in the future

Go on… explore a few of these…

KidsClick Go To KidsClick

Primary School.com.au – This is a site put together by a classroom teacher and is filled with useful sites for all areas of study.

Go to Primary Schools.com.au

Yahoo Kids – This one doesn’t work too well at school but is fantastic at home.
Go To YahooKids

Ask Jeeves 4 Kids – Try the books on the side Go To Ask Jeeves 4 Kids

Google Student Directory – Another excellent site for home:)The Google Student Directory

Use these sites for more ‘kid friendly’ information.

Adrian

What makes a math website ‘cool’?
What makes a math website useful?

There are many questions that students need to reflect on in regards to the worth of some of the ‘educational resources’ available on the Internet.

Tonight I’ve added to my website a website review task in which the children need to explore a few math websites that I chose and discuss them. They then have to head to the Internet to see what they can find in the way of ‘Cool Math Websites’.

They then have to blog their findings and invite comments. This is a really good activity as so much fantastic discussion and reflection occurs. The other benefit is you might come away with a few new math websites for your Teacher Toolbox

cheers

Adrian

Kids love secret codes and I am always amazed by how much they get into cryptography activities.

Check out some of my ideas for investigating Secret Codes in class

cheers

Adrian

Soma cubes are excellent puzzles for classroom use. Make some and get some problem solving happening in your classroom, home and school.

Check out what they are and how to make them in the problem solving area of my website.

cheers

Adrian

This morning I wrote a little something about my thoughts on ‘Teaching Comprehension’ to a newsgroup I belong to. I then thought I’d make it my blog post and maybe soon get around to making a webpage for the other two strategies.

(Adrian B mounts his soapbox)

Hi All,

In my experience ‘comprehension activities’ often amount to worksheets that require students to ‘find answers’ on the page. (yes I know that all generalisations are evil).

http://www.adrianbruce.com/motivational_posters/
motivation5/motivation5.htm

I propose that teachers need to be aware of 3 main strategies that actually
teach children how to comprehend what they are reading and what they have read.

1. Reciprocal Teaching – http://www.adrianbruce.com/reading/room4/recip/index.htm
(you can download the cue cards here to make this an independent activity)

This is an excellent resource for teaching in information texts. It is a bit dry but if you discuss the metacognition behind it you get good results. The kids also like to ‘race’ who can find a fact/place/definition fastest between traditional atlases/ dictionaries etc and Google Earth, Wikipedia etc

2. Three Level Questioning – I use the terms ‘Here Questions’ – you can put your finger on the part of the text where the answer is. ‘ Hidden Questions’ where the answer is often hidden in the text but you will have to think about it a bit’ NB ‘Hidden’ often involve inference – ‘not stated but highly likely’ and ‘Head Questions’ – the answer is in your head.

Found a pfd on a quick search
http://www.dynamiqconsultants.co.uk/DynamiqPDFs/The%20three%20level%20technique.pdf
but there is a fair bit more to it.

Get the kids generating the questions for their classmates – I use, ‘I want you to generate a Head question’ etc and then have the children ask their question to the rest of the reading group.

3. My modifications to Visualising / Verbalising programs – fantastic for narrative texts – Mmmm, can’t find a quick article – crux is – you discuss how visual images in your mind are much more powerful than text in your mind – explore how people visualise – some lucky people see whole movies in their mind. Continuous and in colour. Myself, I see the images as brief flashes but in colour. It is said that some people see the images in black and white but this is getting less since the advent of colour TV and some people see no images at all, but these are a very small minority. Discuss pulling up those images and using words to describe them.

Over the next few weeks I read for 15 minutes every morning and have the kids have their eyes closed with the intention of using clues from the text to build vivid images in their minds. I then spend 15 minutes discussing the images from chapter level, to page level to paragraph level all the way to sentence level.

Each day after the 15 minute reading I get the students into pairs and they must retell the mornings reading. I then get one pair to stand and do a paired story of the morning’s reading. (this keeps them on their toes and stops them having a little sleep) I sometimes give different question stems that the groups have to make questions for.

(Adrian dismounts his soapbox and feels somewhat cleansed)

cheers

Adrian B

PS Make sure you ask, ‘Am I teaching them how to comprehend or simply testing if they can find answers in a text?’