Wednesday, November 30, 2016

How to develop creativity

Creativity,
Isn't it one of the most common words that people are using regarding education and business development? we really want to develop it since childhood, but research shows that it decreases from the point we are finishing pre school.

some will say that we need to create an environment that enable it, but it's too difficult to create it at home, school, afternoon classes etc. all together.
we can develop creativity in different ways, and I want to introduce you to some effective tasks and games we are doing on a daily basis in my class, and also in the teams I'm working with (when we are dealing with challenges and new designs).

You can use all those elements with any group/ class, define the difficulty levels, and most important- they are easy to use, and can take between 7 minutes to an hour.

1. Riddles, logic quizzes, logic missions, challenge tasks:
The element needed is thinking and creating multiple choices of solution while coping with the understanding that mistakes and trial and error are part of learning.
you can ask logic question from age 4- example- :why do we pound a nail on the wall?

I love giving an assignment that require an imagination and coping uncertainty, for example (from my 6th grade class)-
in groups of 4-
you are a group of archaeologists. the year is 1910 (no internet, no mega information libraries on line...)
you are working on ancient site in X
you have experience in the middle east/ South America/ Africa
Suddenly you see a written language you've never seen...
what will you do?

The group have 45 minutes for raising ideas and possibilities, then 45 minutes looking for answers on line, and then a class on the topic with me (you can read on the uncertainty model here)

2. Completion stories:
 when we teach language skills we teach how to write a story (structure); I use movies, inventing stories I tell, video clips, pictures and more to start an idea and let the children continue the idea, write it and develop a conversation on it.

3. Mazes, tracks and courses- building them for children and letting children build their own courses is an practical challenge. you can use every thing you can climb on, pass trough and underneath.
* you can use a rope or wool and create "spider net" in the room; ask the children to walk around the room while avoiding the net.

4. Object what?
give children / adults a practical object and ask them all the uses you can get from it- practical and imaginary.

5. Association games:
association games are amazing for improvement of response speed, creating contexts and increasing thinking speed.
you can play free association.
you can play association chain: every word lead to another that connected to it/ opposite/ parallel.
you can play association of a single term/ word/ concept:love/ food/ happiness etc.
you can play association regarding a question or a riddle that have up to 2 words answer.


I'm here for every question and every note, Sharon.


 All the posts and materials belongs to Sharon Michaeli- Ramon ©

The model of coping with uncertainty while solving problems, challenges and high volume tasks

I've decided to create a method of uncertainty in my class after I've noticed that children (and adults) are having all kind of barriers when they need to cope a challenge- difficult article, new question, new area, thinking missions, solving a problem and more.

I've decided to develop a model to help them cope, and I'm using it mainly in language classes (you can read on it here) and in a weekly lesson of solving a challenges, that is connected to the syllabus, but it's wider and demand different way of thinking (you can read about it here)

The model is build from 5 steps:

1. Excepting the fact that I (the student) will not understand some of the reading material (or task)-         and it's ok.
2.  brain storming all the ideas related to the question/ task.
     Read & summarize as we learned- high light difficult words/ expression, high light main sentence      in a paragraph and summarize each paragraph/ idea.
3. Trying in a group to build a logic flow of the article/ story/ task/ question- out of the box thinking, giving associations and answers (we work on the concept that assumptions in this stage can't be wrong).
3a. sometimes I give access after stage 3 to use technologies and the net.
4. creating data base of all the ideas, answers and information on the board/ app/ other and making sense and order.
5. Giving the holistic order, Giving the answer/s and all the information needed.
    Dialog on the subject.






All the posts and materials belongs to Sharon Michaeli- Ramon ©