Thinking Skills

My favourite thinking skills activity is called 'Look, Look and Look Again'. I love this activity because of the intense sense of concentration that it creates in the room and because it is completely inclusive. Every child can participate and every child's contribution counts. In is a versatile learning activity and once the pupil's have learnt the method it brings out thoughtful and reflective responses.

Today I used key note and mirrored the iPad screen to my projector. Pupils tweeted their repsponses.

Method
Choose a picture. It should be high quality, have enough detail to generate a variety of comments and be engaging enough to force pupil's to concentrate and observe in more detail than they would normally. It should be related to the current class learning.
Explain to pupils that they are about to see a picture on the screen. They will see it for 2 minutes, 1 minute and then for 30 seconds. After each viewing they should write down what they see. I use a writing frame to record the three observations under the headings, Look, Look and Look again. Following this pupils can pair share, share observations in small groups or participate in a larger teacher led session.

Aims
To concentrate and observe detail. To think. To see beyond the surface. To introduce a new learning topic. To add an extra dimension or extend learning topic. To stimulate discussion. To listen to and appreciate different and opposing views. To make inferences, predictions, to ask questions and exercise imagination.

Follow up
I often follow this up with a second thinking skills activity, Before, Now and Next. In this activity pupils use a simple writing frame in three parts to plan a story based on the picture. They start by completing 'now' and write about what's happening in the picture. They must then imagine what happened just before the picture was made / taken and what will happen next. This is a great way to plan a story. More advanced writer could easily progress to telling their story in a non-sequential way.

Today's picture

Today 's picture was part of our work on ultimate questions and letters to God. Some pupils were alarmed at the thought of writing to God, especially those who don't believe in him. But they were more comfortable when I told them they could write to him and explain why they did not believe in him, and ask him all the questions they wanted to ask, as if he did exist. I explained that ultimate questions are big questions in life, they have no single correct answer and people often disagree about the answers.

A thoughtful lesson with a twitter plenary, 'tell me your most interesting thoughts about God, in 140 characters'.