Productive Thinking

In ELD, our wonderful ELP (gifted/talented) teacher comes in once each week to work with my group. We have been learning about productive thinking: coming up with many, varied, and unusual ideas. Our ELP teacher has done a number of fun things to get students working on being creative and using productive thinking. Today's activity was no exception.

First, she had students brainstorm a list of things that are circular. Then she showed how 2 or more circles can be combined to make a snowman, a stoplight and so on. Then she gave them the productive thinking task. She gave them a paper with four shapes. They were to add to these shapes to create pictures. They were to try to come up with several ideas and then choose the idea that they thought would be the most unusual and different. Many of them had some similarities, but there were so many creative ideas. Here are just a few examples of what they came up with:

The four original shapes:



The students' creations:

A toothbrush with toothpaste, a fish, a slingshot and a crayon


the flag (this was a very popular choice) and bowtie



I thought this was so clever. This student used two of the shapes to create a creature or robot. Sorry it is upside down.



cake (also upside down. Sorry!) door, bow and arrow



barbell, rainbow


German flag, dinosaur, design, and a girl looking at herself in the mirror

What clever children!