Cross Curricular

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?

Students Need More Than Independent Work

It's so easy to just ask advanced students to work by themselves in a corner. But, the more advanced the kid, the more they need advanced instruction and adult guidance.

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!

From “Summarize” to “Synthesize”

Even what seems like a low-level "summarize" task can become beautifully high-level when we climb Bloom's Taxonomy.

Ask Them Which Is Better

Moving from analysis to evaluation sure makes things more fun. Why? Check out these examples. Which would you rather answer?

Remixing Stories With Gifted Students

One of my favorite ways to differentiate for gifted students is to create "remixes" of an existing idea. Students take an existing story, reshape it, and create a new product. It encourages them to explore the stories behind existing stories, helps them to understand how real writers work, and gives them a creative way to explore literature.

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 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.

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.

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