Creativity

A large part of what we do has to do with being critical and creative thinkers. We focus on the characteristics of different types of critical and creative thinking: fluency, flexibility, elaboration, originality, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, risk taking, complexity, curiosity, and imagination. Today we focused on three of these characteristics: Flexibility results in many different kinds of ideas. The purpose of flexible thinking is to generate and promote responses that deviate from normal thought patterns. Elaboration is the creative thinking behavior that results in adding to or embellishing an idea. It is the ability to add details, fill in the gaps, build a group of related ideas and expand ideas. Originality is the creative thinking behavior that produces new or novel responses. Originality is often the by product of other creative thinking behavior. Most of all today we discussed how creativity can simply mean looking at the ordinary and seeing the extraordinary.

Top 40!

Wow! I am so proud of everbody and what a fantastic job they did in our 3 performances of our Top 40 Musical! The show was outstanding and I was amazed by our fabulous performers. I did not get the chance to take many pictures so I would love to get pictures sent to me so that I can out them together for a slide show. Stay tuned for more about the musical...

Musical is Coming Soon!

Our gifted musical is fast approaching! Please mark your calendars...Evening performance January 22nd 7:00pm and morning performances January 23rd K-2 9:30am and 3-5 10:30am. Please join us for some "Top 40" tunes!

K/1 Goes Green!

Wordle - k/1 goes green (click on the link to see our "word cloud")

Our new Book of the Month When Santa Turned Green by Victoria Perla inspired us to brainstorm ways that we could help save the planet. The author wrote this book to teach her own children about global warming in a non-scary way. She wanted to show them that they could make a big impact just by making lots of little changes. Each of us made our own list of ways that we could help and then we used Wordle to create a word cloud. As you can tell the biggest thing we can do is to recycle! Check out this list off more ways you can "go green."

It Looked Like Spilt Milk...

The 7 Habits of Happy Kids

Today we read a book called The 7 Habits of Happy Kids by Sean Covey. The 7 Habits are based on principles such as responsibilty, vision, respect, teamwork, and balance. Today we met the kids of 7 Oaks- Goob Bear, Lilly Skunk, Sophie Squirrel, Sammy Squirrel, Pokey Porcupine,Jumper Rabbit, and Tagalong Allie. We also heard a story about Sammy the Squirrel who was "Bored, Bored, Bored." We learned the 1st habit-Be Proactive, in other words you're in charge. We taked about being responsible for our own lives, for our own fun and boredom, our own learning, and for our own happiness or unhappiness. We can't wait to read more and learn the other 6 Habits!

Of course, we could not let this important Election Day go by without talking about the elections, past presidents and how important it is to vote. We did an activity called President for a Day and found out what a typical day might be like for the president.

See you next week!