Developing Thinking Skills Through Creative Writing

Developing Thinking Skills Through Creative Writing: Story Steps for 9-12 Year Olds is a practical and easy-to-use teacher resource helping children across a wide age and ability range to develop the skills necessary to write more effectively. Step-by-step instructions encourage children to tackle tasks of increasing difficulty while broadening their knowledge and experiences of fictional genres. With chapters separated into distinct genres: ghost story, fantasy, science fiction, history, pirate story, thriller and Gothic horror, this book: Offers a summary at the start of each chapter to help teachers select the relevant activities. Covers multiple aspects of storytelling from narrative structure, plots, characters and settings to vocabulary, word choice, sentence structure and punctuation. Provides a cross referencing grid showing which aspects of writing appear in each chapter. Includes guidance notes, extension activities and general tips. Adaptable to different teaching situations, this book offers the opportunity for teachers to work through the book genre by genre or take a 'skills route' with different activities from different chapters to create their own programme of study. Fully illustrated and supporting the requirements of the National Curriculum, Developing Thinking Skills Through Creative Writing is a valuable aid for all Key Stage 2 teachers.

This exciting practical resource is full of immediately usable activities to help children develop their literacy skills and creative writing abilities. The 'story strand' technique begins with one simple picture and by adding others to form a sequence, shows children how to build narrative in an enjoyable, creative and systematic way. Story strand activities help children weave their thoughts into a coherent pattern and so become more skilful writers. The activities are sequenced to increase the creative and intellectual demands on pupils, and can also be used individually to highlight different aspects of the writing process such as: Exploring the varied meanings of certain words through association webs Moving from simple to more complex sentences Learning how to enrich writing using strong, vivid adjectives, verbs and adverbs Understanding how to use connectives more insightfully to give narrative a greater logical consistency Creating narrative refinements such as subplots, flashbacks and 'cliffhangers' out of basic plot sequences A 'thinking skills' agenda underpins each story strand game, and many promote speaking and listening skills by encouraging discussion and collaborative exploration of the images. Supported by a companion website that includes downloadable images from the book, colour images and worked examples for the 'story string idea', additional activities and games, as well as links to the National Curriculum.

Drawing on the author's personal experience, this book provides a deeper understanding of how children experience the writing process in primary school. The framework termed 'think for writing' purports that training children in creative writing and providing creative thinking opportunities can develop their writing and improve their confidence in writing. Aimed at all teachers and trainees, it examines each element of the framework: the thinking environment, task design, training creative thinking, the building blocks of the writing process, and developing children's creative self-efficacy. This range of ideas and approaches across all elements of the writing process that teachers can adapt, adopt and apply to their own practice. This book also demonstrates that a lot of the key work in developing writing is done in between the building blocks of the writing process. This work in the gaps includes process feedback and feedback on the application of ideas. Ultimately, this book provides a resource for teachers to develop their writing pedagogy and children's outcomes whilst meeting National curriculum for England and Wales requirements and demands of standardised testing. Teachers can feel a lot more assured when designing units of work in primary English with this helpful framework, that provides them with this knowledge and details on how to apply it.

Based on over fifteen years of groundbreaking research, Developing Creative Thinking Skills helps learners demonstrably increase their own creative thinking skills. Focusing on divergent thinking, twelve inventive chapters build one’s capacity to generate a wide range of ideas, both as an individual and as a collaborator. This innovative textbook outlines a semester-long structure for the development of creative thinking skills and can easily be utilized as a self-directed format for those learning outside of a classroom. Readers are stimulated to maximize their own creativity through active exercises, challenges to personal limits and assumptions, and ideas that can help create powerful habits of variance.

A professional strategies notebook developed for grades 6-12 provides teachers with strategies to build every student's mastery of high-level thinking skills and includes model lessons featuring questioning, decision-making, creative thinking, problem solving, and idea generating.

Why should children learn to write fluently? What difference will it make to them and the opportunities available to them later on in life? The ability to communicate clearly, accurately and persuasively is a vital life skill. Deficiencies in motivation and thinking skills pervade the challenge of improving children's literacy levels. Get Them Thinking Like Writers! combines practical activities to help children aged 7-11 develop their writing skills, with insights into the attitude that experienced writers apply to their craft. The activities explore different working methods - such as how authors tap into and develop their creativity and how they deal with 'writer's block' - and are supported by strategies for thinking that will develop children's literacy and the way they use language to express their opinions in all subject areas. Steve Bowkett, author, storyteller and education consultant, provides the key concepts and learning benefits of each strategy, along with a series of activities, extension ideas and useful links. Linked resources can be found on the series companion website.

Developing Creative Thinking to Improve Academic Writing, Part One fosters skills of critical thinking needed in academia in which graduation papers and other kinds of research assignments are written. Moreover, the book enhances the abilities of intermediate and upper-intermediate level international students to reflect on their own metacognition in order to produce well-structured essays. The purpose of this book is to help the students develop a high level of cognitive skills in order to analyze, examine, verify, and develop ideas required to process topics from new and/or multiple unfamiliar standpoints and generate as many details as possible about it. Improving critical thinking skills encourages the students to create new mental thinking channels and promote their own philosophy in their writing to make it thoroughly sophisticated.