Using Fiction Writing Activities to Develop Creative Thinking in the Classroom

• September 29, 2011 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.

We are always on the lookout for more effective ways of teaching creativity in the classroom. With much attention on the decreasing status of the United States in the world economy, the need for a stronger creative class, and the realization that the next generation of professionals and leaders will have to be more innovative than ever to solve the world’s problems, educators need more ways to teach children the ability to engage in creative thinking.

In the classroom, so much of what we do focuses on teaching our students to recognize and repeat patterns. Mathematical functions follow patterns. Letters and languages represent graphical and sound patterns that have meaning because of their repetition.

Creativity, on the other hand, is the breaking of patterns. In the creative act, the mind proceeds to a place where there is no existing path to follow, building something new where there was nothing before.

So therein lies our problem: if teaching strengthens the mind’s ability to recognize patterns of meaning, how do we teach creativity – an act that by its very nature breaks with patterns?

The neuroscience research behind brain plasticity has shown us how the brain responds to stimuli by forming neural pathways, and that the brain constantly changes, much like a landscape changes under the influence of the forces of water and wind. The brain adapts in order to more efficiently recognize and make use of the information and patterns that make up the world in which we live.

The answer: we need to teach the patterns that support creative thinking. Writing fiction and storytelling offer immense power and potential for us to help our students learn to break their patterns of thinking and develop these creative habits of mind.

Creative idea generation is not easy; in fact, it can be quite intimidating for a great many youngsters, not to mention adults. Our goal should be to help our students let go of their inhibitions and become comfortable with – or even better, excited about – undertaking creative challenges.

From a practical standpoint, we have access to endless activities to spur our students on to cultivate their creativity through writing fiction. These are just three of them:
 

• Ask students to develop a “what if” question and then answer it with a story. That simple act of creating their “what if” question forces the mind to go to a place it has never been before, and in writing the story, they get to spin out that idea as far as it will go.
  Example: “What if mice could read minds?” or “What if we could send a spaceship to a black hole?”
• Give each student a character from one well-known story, place that character in the context of another well-known story, and ask them to write about what happens. Example: “The giant climbs down the beanstalk and meets three little pigs. What happens next?”
• Ask each student to select one item they would want with them if they were stranded on a desert island. Then, ask them to write a story about how they got to the island and how that item ensured their survival. Example: “I would want a small folding knife. When I fell off the ship during a storm, I had had it in my pocket because I had been carving a stick on the deck. Luckily, it didn’t fall out of my pocket when I hit the water…”

While it offers a higher level of challenge, I’d like to offer one final exercise to consider adapting for your students: the six word short story. Perhaps the most famous example is Ernest Hemingway’s story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” This kind of poetic and conceptual challenge forces students to combine creative thinking with a laser-focus on word choice.

For younger students, this can be adapted by asking students to write their own six-word versions of well-known stories and fables. More advanced students can be given the freedom to come up with their own stories.

While these fiction writing activities are primarily for elementary school students, they can all be adapted for adolescents and, especially in the case of the six-word exercise, adult learners.

But notice that each of these examples puts some limits around the creative process. This is the key to fostering creative thinking: through focusing each student’s effort into a tightly formulated creative problem, they are then freed to develop and follow their ideas to conclusion.

In such fictional writing, students learn that they have the power to break patterns of thinking and develop their own creative ways to think through problems, skills that will serve them well as they grow and mature into tomorrow’s creative thinkers and leaders.

In my own six words? Your instruction focused, their creativity unleashed.

For resources on teaching fiction writing, visit the National Writing Project and their resources for teaching fiction writing and Creative Writing: Teaching Theory and Practice.

Related Reading:

Teaching and Learning with Intent through Guided Reading Activities

The Great Homework Debate: Is Homework Helpful or Harmful to Students?

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: arts, creativity, effort, elementary learning, learning through play, motivating students, play, teacher impact, writing

Still the Write Stuff: Why We Must Continue Teaching Handwriting

• August 23, 2011 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.

When it comes to lost arts, we could argue that none is getting lost faster than handwriting. Since the personal computer and now the telephone have become the primary methods for recording our ideas, we simply do not write – I mean with an actual writing implement like a pen or pencil – as much as we used to.

So, we must ask ourselves, is this really a problem? Sure, one could argue that receiving a handwritten letter is more meaningful than getting one that is typed, but that’s an emotional opinion; it’s not a scientific argument. And aren’t professionals in all fields using more computers, tablets and handhelds to communicate, record and share ideas? So, what is the real value of learning handwriting skills versus being able to type 100 words per minute on a QWERTY keyboard?

At Indiana University, Dr. Karin Harman James, assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences, focuses her research on how motor stimuli can influence our visual recognition, and how the brain changes as we have different experiences. This research provides a basis for a scientific argument for the continued instruction of handwriting.

In a 2008 study published in the Journal of Cognitive Science, adults were shown new characters as well as a mirror image of these characters after reproducing them through writing and keyboarding. When quizzed afterward, subjects were shown to have a “stronger, longer lasting recognition” of the characters’ correct orientation when they had written them by hand versus produced them by matching them to a keyboard button. This suggests that engaging the motor nerves to create the shapes by hand helped solidify the ability to identify such shapes.

In another study, James’ team took this idea to the next level to see what was actually going on inside the brain during these activities. They used a functional MRI to map brain activity in children as they looked at letters before and after letter-learning instruction. Their results showed that those who practiced writing the letters showed more brain activity than those who only looked at the letters. In addition, according to a 2010 report on the research in the Wall Street Journal Online, James said that after four weeks of training, the children who practiced writing skills showed brain activation similar to an adult’s.

Between these two studies, we see excellent examples of brain plasticity at work. James’ work demonstrates a clear connection between how engaging more of the brain in the activity of writing improves how letters are committed to memory. Given that letter recognition is an essential step for early readers, it’s easy to see why practicing writing letters is an essential component of the groundwork for later success.

Certainly, with limited time, schools try to maximize student achievement, and give them a baseline of skills that will allow them to continue to develop to optimize their success throughout life in an increasingly technology-based society. That said, based on James’ research, it’s quite clear that penmanship has an important place in the classroom, and not just as an important traditional skill.  In actually applying pen to paper, we allow our students to engage their brains in ways that typing on a keyboard cannot. And whether such an activity is done with pen and paper, a stylus and a tablet PC or chalk on a blackboard, it is in every student’s best interest to practice the “write” stuff.

For further reading:

The many health perks of good handwriting. Deardorff, Julie. Chicago Tribune, June 15, 2011. Referenced on August 14, 2011.

How handwriting trains the brain. Bounds, Gwendolyn. The Wall Street Journal Online, October 5, 2010. Referenced on August 14, 2011.

Writing strengthens orthography and alphabetic-coding strengthens phonology in learning to read Chinese. Guan, Connie Qun; Liu, Ying; Chan, Derek Ho Leung; Ye, Feifei; Perfetti, Charles A. Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 103(3), Aug 2011, 509-522.

 

Related Reading:

Why Limit Screen Time? Scientific Research Explains

Ok, so you made a mistake. But look what you learned!

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: brain development, brain plasticity, brain training, cognitive skills, creativity, digital natives, early learning, elementary learning, memory, processing, writing

Grammar Skill Improvement with Fast ForWord Software

• May 19, 2011 by Barbara Calhoun, Ph.D

This study was part of Dr. Beth Rogowsky’s doctoral research and was published in her dissertation in 2010.  At the time of this study, Dr. Rogowsky was an experienced educator.  Returning for her doctorate at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, Dr. Rogowsky was interested in data-driven decisions, and wanted to know whether the Fast ForWord products would improve the grammatical skills of a group of typical middle school students.  The middle school in which Dr. Rogowsky taught had four marking periods each year.  During each marking period, students took two elective courses. 

During the 2009-2010 school year, the sixth graders were randomly assigned to use Fast ForWord during one of their electives; one-fourth of the students during each marking period.  The students who used Fast ForWord during the 3^rd marking period formed the experimental group in Dr. Rogowsky’s study while the students who were scheduled to use Fast ForWord later formed the comparison group.  Students’ grammar skills were evaluated at the beginning and end of the 3^rd marking period.

Study participants were 81 sixth graders.  Group 1 consisted of 40 students who used Fast ForWord during the third marking period.  Group 2 consisted of 41 students who did not use Fast ForWord until after the study was over.  Students were assessed at the beginning and end of the study (January and April).

Using the 40-Minute protocols that require students to use the products 40 minutes a day, five days a week, the students first used Fast ForWord Literacy.  After they finished Fast ForWord Literacy, students used Fast ForWord Reading Level 2.  Students were evaluated at the start of the study, and again at the end, with the Written Expression Scale from the Oral and Written Language Scales, also known as the OWLS.  The written section evaluates students’ knowledge of convention and content.  Convention covers a variety of areas including spelling, capitalization and punctuation, linguistics, modifiers, phrases, verb form while content includes details, coherence, unity, and the presence of supporting ideas.  Students are scored on a scale where 100 is average, and the standard deviation is 15.

At the start of the study, there was not a statistically significant difference between the scores of the students in the two groups.  On average, students in both groups were a bit above the 50^th percentile which corresponds to a score of 100. However, after the experimental group used the Fast ForWord products, there was a statistically significant difference between the scores of the two groups, and there were statistically significant increases in the scores of the group that had used Fast ForWord products. The results of this study led Dr. Rogowsky to conclude that the Fast ForWord products can improve students’ grammar skills and the improvements are evident in a classwide implementation.

Rogowsky, B. (2010). The Impact of Fast ForWord® on Sixth Grade Students’ Use of Standard Edited American English. Doctor of Education dissertation, Wilkes University. 

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, brain training, increased test scores, middle school learning, student growth, technology in education, video, writing

Let's Get Engaged!

• April 21, 2011 by Terri Zezula

The pressure on educators in today’s environment is nothing short of brutal. Achieving a balance between individualizing instruction and ensuring that all students are performing against standards requires comprehensive expertise, the ability to adapt to immediate needs of students and classrooms, and saintly patience.

This balancing act is especially challenging for educators in ESL classrooms. They not only have to deal with the same variations in skills, knowledge and experience that every classroom teacher must face; they must also engage students of varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds, making for an especially challenging mix of communications and social skills.

So, what kinds of reading activities can we use to teach all of these different students and engage them for maximum effectiveness? There is certainly no shortage of great techniques and ideas out there that we can mine. We need only to look to resources like The Internet TESL Journal, Dave’s ESL Café, ManyThings.org, and the US State Department’s English Teaching Forum for great techniques as well as background research.

Here are just a few seed questions to help you think about designing engaging ESL reading activities:

What’s your sign? The world we live in is awash with language in the form of signs and advertisements. Looking at signage out in the world around us not only offers wonderful, relevant reading material, it gives students short, quick messages to read and interpret. ManyThings.org offers an archive of over 700 photographs of signs to pull from at http://www.manythings.org/signs/.

What’s your story? Reading stories along with audio recordings is an excellent way to solidify reading and comprehension skills. We can maximize student engagement by choosing stories that are directly relevant to the cultural backgrounds of our students.  Not only will this engage individual students, but it will provide fodder for cross-cultural conversation and understanding. Further, in highlighting individual students’ cultures, it allows each to shine and find pride in their background. For stories, check out Folk Tales from Around the World and the World of Tales.

What’s cool? Maybe the most effective way to engage students in reading is to select activities that are of genuine interest to them as individuals. What are the things that they think are, well, cool? Where are their passions? Designing activities that plug into those interests has incredible potential for maximum effectiveness. Websites like How Stuff Works offer endless resources for allowing students to read and learn about the topics that they find most interesting. And when they’re genuinely interested, they are most likely to want to read more, discuss more and write more.

Finding the “sweet spot” for designing ESL reading activities requires a great arsenal of tactics, tools and techniques. But if we can create and execute activities that teach the essential skills through harnessing each student’s passions and interests, we are that much more likely to help them learn successfully.

Related Reading:

Indispensible Automaticity: How Reading Frees the Mind to Learn

How Learning to Read Improves Brain Function

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Categories: English Language Learners, Reading & Learning

Tags: creativity, improving reading skills, learning to read, literacy, motivating students, reading comprehension, student reading growth, teacher impact, writing

Announcing the Create a Character Contest Winners!

• November 19, 2010 by Norene Wiesen

Boy did we have fun judging the Back-to-School Create a Character contest!  Who knew there was such fantastic creativity and imagination out there just waiting to be unleashed?

I am pleased to present the winning entries:

1^st Place: “Danny Dinosaur” (Written description only)

“Danny Dinosaur is a dinosaur, a T-rex to be exact.  He’s a T-rex who loves food and destruction.  He’s blue and green and loves potatoes.  That’s why he lives in Boise, Idaho, “Home of the Potato.” But that’s not all Danny Dinosaur eats.  He also eats any thing that’s alive.

There’s a bird named Short Stalk who follows Danny Dinosaur every where he goes.  Short stalk is a small, yellow, and pink beaked fella but Danny Dinosaur is a large Dinosaur with an evil smile and sharp teeth sticking out.  Although they have several differences, they are still best friends.  That proves what a unique but odd dinosaur Danny dinosaur is.

The game Danny Dinosaur will be in is called the Flying Dino.  There will be a sentence above the dinosaur, which he will read.  The sentence will have one word missing and the player needs to fill in that blank with the correct word.  If it is right the bird will pick up the word with its beak, fly towards the sentence and fill in the blank.  That would be 3 points.  If it is wrong the bird will correct you and you will get 0 points.”

Danny Dinosaur’s creator, an 8^th grade student in MA, wins a Flip Video camera!

2^nd Place: “Silly Snake”

“Name of character – Silly Snake
He is green with blue eyes and a red tongue.
Silly Snake lives in a cave.
He eats various animals with words on them.
If it is a word he did not say, he spits it out.
When he eats a correct word, he gets closer to his cave.
When he eats incorrect words, he moves away from his cave.”

Silly Snake’s creator, a 4^th grade student in RI, wins a $25 gift card from amazon.com!

3^rd Place: “Randy de la Cruz” (lives in Miami FL)

“My character’s name is Randy de la Cruz.  He lives in Miami, Florida.  He has a girlfriend named Maria and he loves his family.  My character has 4 arms.  It has a blue shirt, orange pants, long boots that are blue, a hat that is black, yellow, and red.  He wears a white belt, glasses, and a necklace.  The two top arms are bigger then the lower arms.  His two feet are like human feet.  He has a head like an alien.  On his hat he has a G for Great Man.  This character has pointy hair.  He is 20 years old.  Randy likes eating meat and rice but, his favorite foods are fish and chicken.  He works at Universal Studios in Florida as an actor.  When he was 17 to 19 he used to work as a carpenter with his step father.  Randy likes drawing and at night he likes to look at the stars.

Randy also likes to help the kids learn new words and he reads stories to kids on the computer.  After he reads a story, Randy asks question to see if they were listening.  The other thing he does to help the kids is to break hard words from the story in parts.  Then the kids have to read and say it completely.  For example, he reads the word “generous” and he breaks it in parts like ge ne rous and the kid hears it on a headphone.  Then the kid says the word completely in a microphone.  Randy is a nice man and likes helping people and making friends.  He will like to be your friend too.”

Randy de la Cruz’s creator, an 8^th grade student in MA, wins a $25 gift card from amazon.com!

The contest judges here at Scientific Learning would like to extend a big “thank you” to all of our contest entrants for entertaining us with your inspired drawings, stories, and game ideas.

And might I just say, nice showing New England!

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Categories: Fast ForWord

Tags: arts, creativity, Fast ForWord characters, learning through play, writing

Find Your Footprint!

• October 19, 2010 by Carrie Gajowski

This fall, National Geographic is encouraging students in grades K – 12 to submit ideas and enter the “Find Your Footprint” contest.  The multi-media "Find Your Footprint" program includes online, on-air and print educational opportunities that focus on conserving energy, reducing waste and conserving water tips. 

Here's more information for students interested in entering this contest: 

1. Pick one of these three themes:  Save Water, Reduce Waste, Save Energy. 
2. Research how you can make the biggest difference in making both your school and the world a “greener” place to live. 
3. Take your ideas about making your school's environmental footprint smaller to your school officials. 
4. Working with your teacher, come up with ideas on how your classroom can impact your school's footprint. 
5. Write up your ideas and illustrate your proposals with photos, movies and illustrations and send these in before December 3, 2010. 

Prizes range from National Geographic Kids magazine subscriptions to five Promethean interactive digital whiteboards (ActivBoards). 

Entries are being received through December 3, 2010. The contest is open to students and teachers from grades K – 12. 

Enter today and good luck!

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Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: arts, creativity, writing

Announcing the Back-to-School Create a Character Contest!

• August 26, 2010 by Carrie Gajowski

Scientific Learning is sponsoring a Back-to-School Create a Character Contest from August 25, 2010 – November 1, 2010.  The contest is open to any teacher, other educator, or student over the age of 5 (with their parents’ permission).  Entrant must be a resident of the United States or Canada (excluding Quebec). 

If I want to enter, what should my entry include?

Send us a written description of a new Fast ForWord® character. Consider including a name, a physical description, where the character would live, what it would do and eat, and any other information that you think we should know about the character.  Pictures of the character are encouraged, but not required. Animations should not be submitted.  Make sure that what you send is clear and legible.  Only original work will be accepted and you must have all rights and permissions to use it.

What can I win?

• 1st prize:  Flip camera
• 2nd and 3rd prizes:  $25 gift cards from Amazon.com

How do I enter? 

• Send a completed and signed entry form and your Submission by regular mail to:

                Create a Character Contest
                Scientific Learning Corporation
                300 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Suite 600
                Oakland, CA 94612

• Entrants 13 and over may also send their completed and signed entry forms and submissions by email to cgajowski@scilearn.com.  Entrants under 13 may not enter via email, only by regular mail.  

The winners will be announced on or before November 23, 2010. 

Watch the video created by Greg Allen, Senior Artist at Scientific Learning, to see how one of the Fast ForWord characters is created or to get some ideas to get started! Click here for the contest entry form, or here for the official contest rules.

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Fast ForWord

Tags: creativity, Fast ForWord characters, video, writing

Nevada Department of Education: Fast ForWord is a “High-Gain Program”

• July 21, 2010 by Melissa Agocs

The Nevada Senate Bill 185 (SB 185) funded districts to purchase and implement innovative and remedial educational programs, materials, and strategies specific to their academic needs. 

The Nevada Department of Education commissioned the Leadership and Learning Center (LLC) to conduct an in-depth evaluation of the programs that had been purchased with SB 185 grants.  Their 2010 Interim Report includes a review of the performance of Fast ForWord products.

To quote from the Report….“Emphasis was placed on measuring student growth toward academic proficiency and mastery using state and local assessments… The analyses were completed as a result of extensive site visits, phone interviews, and an examination of two-year sets of school cohort achievement data for Criterion-Referenced Tests (CRT) for grades three through eight and High School Proficiency Exams (HSPE) for grades nine through twelve.” 

The Report closely examined CRT results at Goolsby Elementary School (which implemented Fast ForWord across all grade levels).  They concluded that each year of Fast ForWord implementation resulted in an increase in the percentage of grade-level proficient students. To quote the Report, “CRT data indicate a statistically significant increase in Reading and Writing proficiency levels…   CRT data indicate that Reading increased from 67% to 82% proficient, [and] Writing increased significantly from 55% to 82% proficient… from 2006 to 2008.”

This graph summarizes the main conclusions from the Report. The red bars represent programs that were found to have undetermined effects or low gains. Blue bars indicate high-gain programs, in which students made high gains according to the LLC standards. The green bar represents Fast ForWord, which was also found to be a high-gain program. In fact, the Report concludes that Fast ForWord products increased student reading achievement by an average of 22.2 percentage points, which was the largest average impact of all programs reviewed in the Report. The percentile scores shown in the graph represent an analysis of data from one to multiple schools using the specified product. In the case of Fast ForWord products, data from three schools were included in the analysis.

For more information, please see the Educator Briefing on this study as well as any of our 200+ additional reports on Fast ForWord results.  If you have questions about any of our research studies, please contact us.

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Categories: Education Funding, Grants, and Stimulus, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic proficiency, academic success, accelerate learning, child reading development, elementary learning, elementary school learning, improving reading skills, increased test scores, innovation, learning to read, middle school learning, Nevada, remedial education, SB 185, struggling readers, struggling students, student reading growth, technology in education, writing

Meet our Science of Success Microgrant Recipients

• July 1, 2010 by Norene Wiesen

We asked members of the WeAreTeachers.com (WAT) Brain Research Microcommunity to submit ideas for keeping their students’ brains fit.  All entries were reviewed and voted on by the WAT community for a chance to receive one of five Science of Success microgrants.  We received over 178 entries, and are pleased to share the five peer-selected winners and their project proposals for promoting brain fitness in the classroom:

1) Jason Dietrich, Illini Central High School: Engineering in the Classroom with LEGO NEXT and Carnegie Mellon Curriculum
The purpose of this project is to engage students in open-ended design problems using current technology in robotics research and college academic work. Activities involved in this project will challenge students to develop critical scientific inquiry skills and apply these skills in technological design. Specifically, students will: Write programs for the LEGO NXT Intelligent Brick using LEGO Mindstorms Educational Software 1.1 [Powered by National Instruments Lab View Software]   Full proposal.

2) Don Sarazen, H.B. Rhame Elementary School: Are They Really "Double Stuffed?"
My idea is to have my students remove the cream from a regular Oreo cookie and a Double Stuf Oreo cookie, measure the mass of both cream samples, and determine if a Double Stuf Oreo really has twice as much cream as a regular Oreo. They will do this using triple beam balance scales and electronic scales that measure to the nearest tenth of a gram. Description: My students will then write letters to report the results of their investigation to Kraft Foods, the company that makes Oreos.  Full proposal.

3) Melissa Wlodarski, Eggers Middle School: Brain Yoga...starting our day the SMART way!
Description: Science has proven that completing certain activities every day will help keep our students minds sharp, and improve memory. For this program, students will participate in various "brain yoga" activities during their homeroom period each morning. These activities will include: activating pressure points, which are proven to increase energy and improve attention span (particularly good for students with ADHD), writing activities, and various right brain/left brain activities to start the day.  Full proposal.

4) Gail Feely, Caldwell Elementary: Growing Algae in the Classroom, an Alternate Energy Source
My students will learn about algae as a unicellular living organism and also as an alternate energy source. We will set up a controlled photo bioreactor in which to grow algae. I have met with a local alternate energy team who is willing to work with my students in building a photo bioreactor made of PVC pipe. I think this will be an amazing experience for my students as well as the local team. It will be a trial and error project to find ideal growing conditions to reproduce algae.  Full proposal.

5) Lynn Farr, Martin Elementary: What's the Matter: Weekly class for hands-on science fun
Description: I would like to provide EVERY student from grades K-5 in our school the opportunity to explore matter through hands-on science fun. After a 6 week instruction period on grade-level science standards, students will participate in a "make-and-take" project supporting lessons and concepts learned. Ideas include: Lava lamp, blubber, rocket, sedimentary rocks... Full proposal.

Each winner receives a FlipVideo™ camera or an iPodNano® to capture their project in action. Congratulations to all!

All 178 entries can be viewed in the WAT's Scientific Learning Teacher Grant page.

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Education Funding, Grants, and Stimulus

Tags: ADHD, attention, creativity, elementary learning, elementary school learning, health and well being, high school learning, innovation, memory, science, teacher impact, technology in education, writing

Davenport, IA, Succeeds with State-Funded Preschool

• January 26, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba

Three years ago, Iowa's Davenport School District created a state-funded preschool program for 4-year-olds. Enrolled students spend 2 or more hours a day in the classroom learning letters, colors, numbers, and more from a licensed teacher.

The program's curriculum is designed to prepare the students to succeed in kindergarten.  So far, the program seems to be working: 90% of the Davenport students attending early childhood programs began kindergarten achieving at grade level, compared to 66% of students who did not participate.

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Categories: Education Trends, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, attention, early learning, memory, processing rate, sequencing, vocabulary, writing