Keeping Gifted Kids Engaged: Adding Creativity
Welcome back to the Keeping Gifted Students Engaged at the End of the Year blog series!!
Let’s review the problem: Review.
At the end of the year, we review standards we have learned throughout the past 8ish months for our students. Maybe its because there are a few standards we feel are harder and want to ensure students master before moving to the next grade. Or is it because know we skimmed over a standard and wanted to readdress it? MAYBE its because there is a big state test coming up… (Side note – I used to teach 3rd grade in Florida where there was mandatory retention – so I understand the stress of state testing!).
Regardless of the reason for review, we all do it. And most kids really benefit from it! But our gifted kids that understood the material the first time (or maybe before we even taught it…) don’t benefit.
In my last blog post I provided the first alternative to review for gifted kids: Projects and Real World Application.
In this blog post, we will explore: CREATIVITY.
How can we, as teachers, use creativity to engage our gifted students?
Creativity broken down:
What:
Creativity is the use of divergent thinking to create new and unique. Many times, the areas of creativity explored are originality, flexibility, fluency, and elaboration.
Why:
I will be quoting one of my all time favorite books on creativity titled “Creativity in the Classroom: Schools of Curious Delight” by Alane Jordan Starko quite a bit during this blog post. During my Gifted Education masters program, I had to take a class on creativity and this was the textbook. Going into the class, I thought it would be my least favorite and least applicable – I have come to find out it is the opposite. It has actually been my most used information and I continually return to this textbook. I highly suggest it for all teachers!
Starko (2018) writes:
Few critics would argue with the idea that schools should teach students to think critically and understand deeply. Abundant evidence suggests that the strategies that support creativity – solving problems, exploring multiple options, and learning inquiry- also support depth of understanding.
In an education system so concerned about high stakes testing, we manage to move away from incorporating creative thinking strategies. It’s not a standard, so why do it? Creativity is a way to address deeper understanding for ALL students. Gifted students thrive on the open ended opportunities, but ALL students benefit from learning how to think originally, flexibly, fluently and with elaboration.
Motivation:
Possibly a “why” part two…but before I move on to incorporating creativity in the classroom, I want to add that creativity develops intrinsic motivation for students. Because creativity is self-driven, providing students opportunities to be creative about their learning can also impact their desire to learn topics, explore, and develop newer and deeper meaning.
Incorporating Creativity into Your Classroom
The rest of this blog post will explore ways that you can incorporate creativity into the end of the year seamlessly and with little planning! I hope you find these strategies beneficial and helpful for not only your gifted students, but ALL your students!
1. Create Games
If you must review for all students, this is one of the easiest ways to incorporate creativity, in my opinion. Having students create games that others will play allows them to think deeper about the subject. Creating questions, exploring models, and making rules are all part of generating games – skills that would benefit students when reviewing. Then, if students play one another’s games, they will be able to review even more (and in a more motivating way).
Different game creation ideas:
- board games
- movement games
- computer games (I love Kahoot!, Scratch, flippity, PBS Kids)
- strategy games
- puzzle games (whodunit, mysteries, crossword puzzles, cryptic, trivia)
2. Visual Mind Maps
Another great way to review material is through the use of visual maps. Visual maps are great for building creativity because there is no right or wrong way to do it. Students being with the topic they need to review, and they build from there. They can build using pictures, examples, arrows, bubbles, charts, etc. Especially for creative visual students, this can be a great way to review a topic and build deeper understanding.
After students build their visual maps, you can take this a step further by having students compare their visual maps. What is similar? What is different? How did one student display their knowledge vs another?
Additionally, this is a quick way as a teacher to see what students remember and what you might need to review additionally.
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cifor/35849243846
3. Teach Creative Thinking Strategies
My favorite way to incorporate creative thinking is by explicitly teaching it! Many strategies do not take long to teach and can be fun to practice in a plethora of ways. During state testing, this could be a great way to get your kids motivated and excited about fun learning. After, the kids can use their strategies to show their learning of different topics. I typically teach different creative thinking strategies in a week long “boot camp” and have so much fun with it! Here are a few of my favorite strategies:
SCAMPER –
A divergent thinking strategy, each letter stands for a different way to think about a topic: substitute, combine, adapt, magnify/minify/modify, put to other use, eliminate, rearange/reverse. A fun way to introduce this strategy is by having your students SCAMPER a household object to improve it, such as a chair. Students do not need to use every letter, but rather think about each letter for the best possibility. After playing around with the strategy, students could use it to review math topics, analyze characters, create new social studies ideas, or even improve science experiments. The options are endless!
Get more ideas about SCAMPER in the classroom HERE.
Six Thinking Hats –
This is one of my favorite strategies for exploring multiple perspectives created by de Bono. Each of the hats represents a different way of thinking. From yellow representing “benefits and possibilities” to red representing “feelings” – each hat allows students to view a topic from different perspectives. This is one of my favorite lessons to teach in the younger grades because the kids catch on so quickly!
Big Ideas for Little Scholars has a great in depth blog post about this thinking skill and she also has a FREE Cinderella Practice Activity to introduce the concept.
After teaching this skill, students could use it in many ways to review skills learned throughout the year! For example, they could: analyze the different math topics in 3rd grade using each of the hats, explore the central messages of different fables using each hat, problem solve a solution to weather erosion and climate change using each hat, etc!
Bonus: I love to have students examine their own habit. Which thinking skill does your brain use the easiest and most often? Is there one way of thinking that you have to be extra purposeful to use? How should we group students in our class room – with similar thinking habits or different? Many times I will have students color in a little hat with their tendencies and keep it on their desk for others to see!
Using Metaphors and Analogies –
A great creativity strategy that can be used for any subject with little prep. Most students are pretty familiar with metaphors (as we typically teach them paired with figurative language and smilies), but analogies have recently become a skill I teach all primary students! I also stress analogical thinking to parents at the beginning of the year and urge them to practice it at home in a fun way!
Kids can quickly pick up on patterns, but for many it needs to be explicitly taught. When I say “apple is to red as banana is to ____”, kids rapidly respond yellow! But, once I say “2 is to 4 as 5 is to ____”, there is a bit more thinking required. Some students may say 7 and others will say 10. Who is right and why?
You can quickly create analogies for students to finish in math, reading, science… all subject areas! But, the real thinking is when you give the class one word to start and they have to finish the analogy in a creative way. Allowing the class to see all the different patterns each student created is so fun!
One of the freebies I have included for my email subscribers this week is a parent newsletter and practice I send home each year about analogies! Check it out! (And subscribe to my emails for updates HERE if you don’t already!
4. Creative Writing
When I think about creative writing, I always thought about fantasy or imaginative writing essays. What I have quickly learned as a gifted teacher is that creative writing does NOT have to be long essays, but rather creative ways of thinking and sharing your ideas. It could be through flip grid, podcasts, drawings, etc.
Helping students think in a creative way about a topic through fun prompts is a quick and easy way to deepen their thinking…and motivation!
One of my favorite ways to do this is through book clubs and fun creative prompts. Check them out on TPT HERE. These prompts help students start thinking about the topic in a new or original way – while still analyzing characters, problems, settings, themes, etc.
These writing prompts (or maybe we should call them responding or thinking prompts) can be used in all subjects. In math, it may look like “choose a shape that is the most interesting shape – write about it!” In social studies, it could look like “if you were to be alive during any time period in your states’ history, when would it be and why?”
Interested in more? Check out one of my favorite recent creative writing prompt books on Amazon HERE: Rip The Page by Karen Benke
THANK YOU
Thank you for bearing with me through a long blog post. I had not intended it to be so long, but as I started writing, my ideas continued to flow! I would love to hear from you if you try any of these strategies or if you have any others to add to the list! Add to the comments below or join me on instagram @giftedwithgoldens
Thank you for joining me on this series: Keeping Gifted Kids Engaged at the end of the Year! Check out the other blog posts in the series if you missed any, and make sure to subscribe to my email list to be notified of new posts and receive all the freebies!
Keeping Gifted Kids Engaged Series:
Blog #1: Projects and Real World Application
