An Epic Collection of Free Thinking Tools for Teachers and Students

 Last month we began offering the webs best collection of free classroom posters to Print and download and beautify your classroom.

This month we are offering an excellent collection of Thinking tools specifically aimed at teachers and students to help them improve their logical ordering of ideas and enhance creativity. 

Today we are proud to publicize these thinking tools and will be adding a new thinking tool every day.

We have begun the collection with over fifteen different thinking tools you can download immediately and like our classroom posters have, these will grow dramatically over the next few weeks.

All of these tools have been produced as high resolution images and will print in great quality at nearly any size.

So enjoy our Thinking Tools and feel free to let us know if there is any specific thinking tool or strategy you would like to see added to the collection.

The Ultimate Guide to Teaching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie and the Chocolate factory is one of the most popular children's books of all time.  It is a brilliantly written story by Author Roald Dahl and there has been two starkly different, but very popular films based on it.

Therefore "Charlie" offers a multitude of teaching and learning opportunities based around the themes of bad parenting, mischievous children, greed, gluttony and much more.  Roald Dahl uses little Charlie Bucket as a role model to oppose all of the horrible aspects of the other children selected to enter Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

This Grid I have constructed uses Blooms Taxonomy as a framework to study the book and films and has 42 excellent teaching and learning ideas.

It would be recommended that the book and both films are watched to get the most out of this grid, and there is more than enough here to keep your students busy and enthused for a fortnight depending upon how you structure your learning sessions.

I hope you like the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Learning Grid and if you have any fresh ideas to add to it we would love to hear them.

Download the grid here.

THINKING BLOCKS - HELP KIDS MODEL THEIR MATH PROBLEMS

Thinking Blocksis a suite of learning tools designed to help students solve math word problems accurately and efficiently. Using brightly colored blocks, students model mathematical relationships and identify known and unknown quantities. The model provides students with a powerful image that organizes information and simplifies the problem solving process. By modeling increasingly complex word problems, students develop strong reasoning skills which will facilitate the transition from arithmetic to algebra.

When you first visit the website, you'll find that navigation is as simple as it can get. Just click on the type of math problem that you want to learn, and you'll go to that area of the website. For example, clicking on "Addition" in the menu will take you directly to the area where kids can work on modeling math word problems in order to come up with the solution. Access it here.

Thinking Blocks - Help Kids Model Their Math Problems

Thinking Blocks is a suite of learning tools designed to help students solve math word problems accurately and efficiently. Using brightly colored blocks, students model mathematical relationships and identify known and unknown quantities. The model provides students with a powerful image that organizes information and simplifies the problem solving process. By modeling increasingly complex word problems, students develop strong reasoning skills which will facilitate the transition from arithmetic to algebra.

When you first visit the website, you'll find that navigation is as simple as it can get. Just click on the type of math problem that you want to learn, and you'll go to that area of the website. For example, clicking on "Addition" in the menu will take you directly to the area where kids can work on modeling math word problems in order to come up with the solution.  Access it here.

Free Printable Graphic Organizers

This collection of ready-to-use graphic organizers will help children classify ideas and communicate more effectively. All of our printable graphic organizers are designed to facilitate understanding of key concepts by allowing students to visually identify key points and ideas. By using graphic organizers across all subject areas, you will be empowering your students to master subject-matter faster and more efficiently. We have graphic organizers for reading, science, writing, math, and for general use. You'll also find blank printable templates like graph paper, dot arrays, and other useful tools. Access them here.

Introducing Harvard's Thinking Classroom Model

Harvard has a great resource for teachers who would liketo have a better understanding of how to create and manage a thinking curriculum within their classroom.

The Thinking Classroom, is all about the teaching of thinking. It is a place where critical and creative thinking count! The Thinking Classroom holds that the quality of students' learning depends on how well students think about their work. For instance, students who consistently tend to connect ideas to things they know about, seek hidden explanations, or think about the strengths and weaknesses in their thinking will develop deeper understandings of subjects across the curriculum than those students who don't. Thus, the Thinking Classroom is committed to the following beliefs:

• Learning is a consequence of good thinking.
• Good thinking is learnable by all students.
• Learning should include deep understanding, which involves the flexible active use of knowledge.

The thinking classroom has a range of strategies, resources and tools that make creating a thinking curriculum practical in any classroom. Access it here.

Model your Math Problems with Thinkingblocks

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Model and Solve Math Word Problems

Thinking Blocks is a suite of learning tools designed to help students solve math word problems accurately and efficiently. Using brightly colored blocks, students model mathematical relationships and identify known and unknown quantities. The model provides students with a powerful image that organizes information and simplifies the problem solving process. By modeling increasingly complex word problems, students develop strong reasoning skills which will facilitate the transition from arithmetic to algebra.

New Features

tutorials are more student driven; students determine the placement of labels and blocks numbers and question marks are draggable components and text input has been eliminated blocks and other components are significantly larger and more robust new modeling tutorial introduces students to word problems with fractions students are shown ways to accurately size blocks in the addition and subtraction module tutorial programs include a calculator enabling students to focus on conceptual understanding full screen option makes Thinking Blocks compatible with interactive whiteboards improved modeling tool includes hundreds of word problems in six major areas of math self-checking feature encourages students to compare their models to those dynamically generated by the program _ Access Thinkingblocks here

Great Educational Games for Students

Thanks to Ryan for this great contribution about creativitygames.net.  It's a website where he's putting weekly word games and other resources to develop creative thinking.  There is also a random word generator which is good for recreating the games in class.  It works nicely on a projector or smart board. http://codebreaker.creativitygames.net

It's a Mastermind like game that is designed it to work well on Smart Boards.  Ryan tells me he has been having success getting the class to solve the code as a group and use it to develop problem solving skills.

Both of these resources have come about as a result of his teaching both at school and uni and  he would now like to share them with as many people as possible.

Thanks Ryan for your efforts and check out his site here.