El Islerinden Anliyaniz var mi?

Bugun kizima bu Fransiz orgusu takimini aldim.Ancak oncesinde benim bunu ogrenmem gerek. Anliyaniniz var mi?:)

Kiz cocugu sahibi olmanin kurdugu baskilardan bir tanesi iste.Annesi gibi beceriksiz olmasin istedim ama Sila bunu benden once sokerse hic sasirmiyacagim.Annemin gelmesini dort gozle bekliyorum,daha ondan ogrenecegim ne cok sey varmis...

Creativity through Geography

The World Cup is a fantastic opportunity to teach the children more about Geography. The stadiums that will be used for the World Cup for example are in the different parts of South Africa. Taking this opportunity, the children can be encouraged to research more about these cities, their features and interesting facts about them. This can be shared with the whole class.





South Africa also has a rich and diverse mix of different cultures with their own languages, traditions and values. The children could also be encouraged to learn more about the different cultures that make up South Africa and learn a little of their language. South Africa does, after all, have 11 official languages and the children could try to learn a simple word like hello, in each of them. This would also give them a broader understanding of just what it means to live in a society where people routinely speak a number of different languages.

No geography lesson about South Africa would be complete without learning something about the wildlife that lives there. The children may well be aware that animals such as elephants and lions live in South Africa, but do they know about the animals that live in the different habitats that make up the country, such as the mountains, coast and deserts?

Unit 17: Global eye
Section 6: What is the African countryside like? How do children in African countries get spectacles?

Objectives
Children should learn:

*about contrasting places
*about the problem of obtaining spectacles in a less economically developed country
*to use globes and atlases

Teachers can take the opportunity of World Cup and deliver Unit 17: Global eye.This will prepare the background of the lesson and will encourage the children to do more research on this topic, as the continent will be a popular topic during this term.


The pictures are from here, here, here and here.

About Creativity:What did they say?

'To make children more 'creative' we should set them a tedious and pointless task. They'll have to think imaginatively to avoid dying of boredom!' Ted Wragg

'Thinking is a skill, not intelligence in action.' Edward de Bono

'A kid is a guy I never wrote down to. He's interested in what I say if I make it interesting.' Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

'It is a pity that the notion of creativity in education has to be fought for... Thinking up fresh ideas is what teachers are paid for.' Ted Wragg

'There's nothing magical about creativity. Einstein was an overnight success after 20 years of failure.' Unknown

'Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in five year's time. And yet we're meant to be educating children for it.' Sir Ken Robinson

'All children are born artists. The problem is getting them to stay that way.' Pablo Picasso

'We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them..' Albert Einstein

'Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.' Josef Albers

'I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.' Edith Ann

'It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.' Edward de Bono

Note:The picture is from this source.

Creativity through PE

This Foundation Subject can be well used with the help of other Foundation Subjects.According to the Rose Report:

"Subject disciplines remain vital in their own right, and cross-curricular studies strengthen the learning of the subjects which make up its content. From the standpoint of young learners, making links between subjects enriches and enlivens them, especially history and geography."
(Rose Report, )



The upcoming World Cup can be used a good opportunity to enhance the cross curricular learning.This following activities and lesson plans are prepared by http://www.kickitout.org and http://www.teachers.org.uk/ websites. As it is explained on the website;

The Football and Freedom learning pack is designed for teachers to use children’s interest in the World Cup to explore South Africa’s history, culture and context.

It is packed with activities aimed at 9-14 year olds which address many elements of the National Curriculum.

Football fan culture, carbon footprints and issues of equal opportunity, discrimination and human rights are covered. Football and Freedom also encourages schools to develop a longer term interest in South Africa through twinning.
The following ideas provide a useful starting point for a number of activities in the classroom that incorporate many aspects related to the teaching of citizenship.It also highlights how football can be used to explore a number of issues.

Starting out
A good starting point for any classroom work on anti-racism is to look at definitions of race, prejudice and discrimination

Race: A group of people connected by common descent

Racism: The word 'racism' comes from the word 'race'. Racism is the belief that people are inferior because they are of a different colour or come from another part of the world. Most commonly racism is prejudice backed up by power.

Prejudice: Is a judgement about something based upon ignorance, making up your mind before you have any facts.

Discrimination: Is when you treat someone differently because of the prejudices that you have about them.

Teachers may want to set some boundaries within the classroom when working in this area about acceptable language etc.

Teachers should ensure that discussions are carefully managed to ensure that a balanced view is given. All of those involved in these activities should be encouraged to listen carefully and sensitively.
(http://www.kickitout.org/390.php)

The website helps teachers to think creatively and take an oppurtunity from a daily topic and reflect this onto their teaching.This is a great way of making the learning more meaningful to the children.As it was mentinoed before; the creative approach is possibly the only way to distinguish thin line between purposeful learning and old fashioned one way teaching.

THE WORLD CUP AND SOME LESSON IDEAS:

The World Cup can also be a good oppurtunity to teach the children more about Geography. The stadiums that will be used for the World Cup are in the different parts of South Africa. Taking this oppurtunity, children can be encouraged to research these cities, their features or interesting facts about them. This can be shared with the whole class. As a part of a PE lesson children can have a World Cup Week where each class will have their own football team. These teams will be selected from same countries in the World Cup.


The World Cup gives the perfect backdrop to interesting and different PE lessons for the children to try. The school could have a World Cup Week where each class will have their own football team and they could compete against each other.

•These teams will be selected from same countries in the World Cup. Teachers should take advantage of this situation and should encourage children to choose less popular countries so that they can learn more about them.
•Each class will support their chosen national team. They will be asked to research and learn more information about these countries and share this information in a school assembly each week.
•The school hall will be prepared like a football stadium for assembly. In this way children will have the feeling of the real atmosphere.
•Children should be encouraged to dress up, paint their faces and create their own chants for the assembly. With the help of the teacher, these chants could be sang, at least in part, in their original language.

This is clearly a more interesting and exciting way of teaching Geography and for the children to learn the importance of having mutual respect for each other. This will also help them to have a better understanding of different cultures. As a part of these preparations, children will need to work as part of a team, researching information, pooling ideas, planning and delivering their chants.



Note:The pictures are from this and this source.

How can teachers promote creativity?

When planning

•Build creative objectives into your planning (you could integrate these with subject-specific objectives).
•Look for opportunities to promote creativity in your existing schemes of work and lesson plans. Could you adapt any activities so that they offer more potential for creativity?
•Devise activities that are personally and culturally authentic. Try to build on pupils’ interests and experiences (both in and out of school).
•Plan for a range of teaching and learning styles so that as many pupils as possible have the opportunity to show their creativity. Role play can increase pupils’ imaginative engagement and give them freedom to explore ideas. Hands-on experimentation, problem solving, discussion and collaborative work all provide excellent opportunities for creative thinking and behaviour.
•Never lose sight of the importance of knowledge and skills. Pupils are only able to engage creatively and purposefully with the challenges they encounter if they have a solid base of knowledge and skills.

When introducing activities

•Give pupils a clear goal that is challenging yet achievable.
•Share objectives with the pupils and give them opportunities to choose ways of working and how to shape the direction of work.
•Stimulating starting points – such as sights, sounds, smells, visits and contact with creative people – capture pupils’ interest and fire their imagination.
•Give pupils a set of constraints (for example limit time and/or resources). This makes an activity more approachable and can encourage pupils to improvise and experiment.

When teaching

•Actively encourage pupils to question, make connections, envisage what might be and explore ideas. Promote and reward imagination and originality.
•Ask open-ended questions such as ‘What if…?’ and ‘How might you…?’ to help pupils see things from different perspectives.
•Value and praise what pupils do and say. Establish an atmosphere in which they feel safe to say things, take risks and respond creatively.
•Create a fun, relaxed working environment if you want to encourage pupils to be adventurous and explore ideas freely.
•Create conditions for quiet reflection and concentration if you want to encourage pupils to work imaginatively.
•Make the most of unexpected events. When appropriate, put aside your lesson plan and ‘go with the moment’, but never lose sight of your overall learning objectives.
•Be willing to stand back and let pupils take the lead. However, make sure that you are always on hand to provide prompts and support as needed.
•Join in with activities and model creative thinking and behaviour. Showing the pupils that you are a learner too can help to create an open, constructive learning environment.
•Give pupils opportunities to work with others from their class, year group and different age groups.

When reviewing work

•Help pupils to develop criteria that they can use to judge their own work, in particular its originality and value (this can be as simple as asking, ‘What makes a good…?’).
•Stop regularly for open discussion of the problems pupils are facing and how they can solve them. Encourage pupils to share ideas with others and to talk about their progress.
•Help pupils to appreciate the different qualities in others’ work and to value ways of working that are different from their own.
•Help pupils to give and receive constructive feedback.
This content relates to the 1999 programmes of study and attainment targets.

Putting creativity at the centre

•Build an expectation of creativity into your school’s learning and teaching policy.
•Consider providing extended cross-subject projects that give pupils opportunities to take greater control of their learning, work together and make connections between different areas of their learning.
•Try to avoid over-compartmentalised teaching. If pupils see ‘the whole picture’ and are helped to recognise relationships and patterns in their learning, they will gain a deeper understanding.
•Involve all the school in an event to experience and celebrate creative learning.
•Show and share tangible changes that result from creativity.
•Encourage, recognise and reward pupils’ creativity. Ask teachers to nominate examples of creativity and celebrate these at a school or year assembly.

Providing resources

•Make sure that pupils have the resources they need to be creative (for example, high-quality materials, tools, apparatus and equipment).
•Make sure that pupils have the space they need to be creative (for example, space for dance and drama, to create on a large scale in art and design).
•Make sure that pupils have access to film, video and the internet (which help them to connect their learning to life outside school) and to first-hand experience of objects and environments (which stimulate their curiosity).
•Agree and provide key entitlements, such as working with artists and other creative professionals, going to the theatre or learning a musical instrument.
•Involve pupils in creating a stimulating environment. For example, they could help to redesign the playground or improve the school’s natural spaces.
•Work with higher education and other agencies to get access to resources.
•Tap the creativity of staff, parents and the local community.
(National Curriculum,2010)

What are conditions are necessary for a creative curriculum?

1.A programme-long approach
2.Progression (arrangements that help students become comfortable with ‘tools’, get them to use tools with less and less help and guidance, and end with them identifying for themselves situations which can be handled well by the use of a combination of the tools they have to hand).
3.Openness to choice. There may be limited choice between modules, but there can be a lot of choice within modules if they are designed on a core-and-application basis. (Teachers introduce the key tools concepts, strategies, information sources and then have students practise them on problems that they, the students, choose/identify).
4.Novel tasks. Where students are set fresh tasks that require them to draw from their learning in several modules and when these are not convergent tasks but ones that allow a variety of good responses, then creativity is favoured. Teachers might find themselves considering the plausibility of the solutions and then awarding marks on the basis of students’ accounts of their problem-working strategies. (NB. It is not a good idea to join the phrase ‘problem-solving’ with ‘creativity’. The one is convergent, the other isn’t.)
5.Differentiated assessment. Narrow, summatively-driven assessment practices will smother creativity.
6.An emphasis on learning for understanding rather than learning for extensive content mastery. There is evidence that an emphasis on coverage encourages superficiality. Superficiality is not conducive to creativity. Understanding, which comes from covering less ground with more emphasis on the underlying concepts, strategies and assumptions, is conducive to creativity. Put it another way: cover less material but in ways that help students to understand more about the domain and its complex learning outcomes.
7.Knowing students. If students understand the ‘rules of the game’ and why the programme is as it is, then they are better placed to reflect and enter into the spirit of the creativity game. Students who do not know the rules are likely to try much harder to bargain it into familiar and safe shapes (Doyle, 1983).
8.Portfolios. Owned by the student and central to metacognition, they encourage learners to sustain their own claims to achievement convergent and divergent in their own ways.
9.Openness to innovation. Possibilities for change need to be designed into the programme from the beginning.
10.Sound evaluations. It has been implied that programmes that favour creativity are rigorous ones. Good programme evaluation practices, ones that go far beyond the standard module tick-list approaches, support rigorous academic practices. (Knight,2002)

Note:The picture is from this source.

How to Assess Creativity?

Assessment key principles

The following four key principles of assessment are designed to help schools take a fresh look at their practice and consider what the experience of assessment is like for their children.

1.The child is at the heart of assessment
2.Assessment needs to provide a view of the whole child
3.Assessment is integral to teaching and learning
4.Assessment includes reliable judgements about how children are performing related, where appropriate, to national standards.

The child at the heart of assessment



Good assessment:
•helps develop successful learners
•recognises strengths and areas for development and clearly identifies ways for children to make progress
•is based around children’s needs and leads to improved attainment and progress
•encourages children to take a central role in their own assessment.

It is clear that many children feel detached from the process of assessment. They view assessment as something that is done to them rather than something they have a stake in. The experience of assessment should motivate children and help them understand what assessment is for and how they can use it to develop as successful learners.

One key way of achieving this is to ensure that all children are actively involved in ongoing assessment conversations with their teachers to celebrate their achievements, recognise their strengths and identify priorities for future learning and how these could be achieved. Having a central role in their assessment helps children to take greater responsibility for their own learning, builds their confidence and helps them make progress.

Provides a view of the whole child

Assessment needs to provide a view of the whole child:

•value and include a wide range of attitudes, dispositions and skills, as well as achievement in subjects
•draw on a broad range of evidence, including beyond the school
•involve those that know the child best – including parents, peers and members of the wider community.

The curriculum aims to develop the whole child and assessment should reflect this. Assessment then creates a rounded picture of the child that values the broad range of attitudes and skills found in the aims of the curriculum and essentials for learning and life. For assessment to be effective teachers need to draw on evidence across and beyond the school environment, and parent/carers, peers or members of the wider community could contribute to the assessment of a child’s achievement. Making these kinds of links can be particularly motivating for children as it helps them to connect the skills and aptitudes they show outside school with those needed to succeed in the classroom.

Integral to teaching and learning
Embedding assessment in teaching and learning:

•is essential in creating personalised learning
•helps teachers to be flexible enough to recognise learning as it happens
•results in decisions and actions from both day-to-day interactions with children and through taking a periodic overview of progress.

To be effective, assessment needs to be flexible enough to recognise when learning is happening – which means understanding that the curriculum offers a wide range of experiences and activities, which can generate many different types of learning evidence. When assessment is at the heart of classroom teaching, it enables teachers to personalise discussions about the next steps for children and shape teaching to best suit their children's needs. Careful planning is required to make this effective – assessment information is most useful when children can take initiative in classes and pursue ideas for themselves rather than relying on their teacher's instruction.

In order to have an impact, assessment must result in decisions and actions for both the teacher and the child. This is achieved in the short term through day-to-day interaction between children and teachers, and in the medium and longer term by taking a periodic overview of progress that draws on a full range of evidence.
(National Curriculum,2010)

In 'Creativity: find it, promote it', QCA suggested that it is possible to identify when pupils are thinking and behaving creatively in the classroom by using the following framework:

* questioning and challenging;
* making connections and seeing relationships;
* envisaging what might be;
* exploring ideas, keeping options open;
* reflecting critically on ideas, actions and outcomes. (QCA 2004)

Note:The pictures are from this and this source.

How Can You Spot Creativity?

We have already defined creativity as being:

• imaginative
• purposeful – directed at achieving an objective
• original
• valuable – in relation to its objective.

But what does this actually look like in the classroom?

When pupils are thinking and behaving creatively in the classroom, you are likely to see them:

• questioning and challenging
• making connections and seeing relationships
• envisaging what might be
• exploring ideas, keeping options open
• reflecting critically on ideas, actions and outcomes.

Questioning and challenging

Creative pupils are curious, question and challenge, and don't always follow rules. They:

• ask 'why?' 'how?' 'what if?'
• ask unusual questions
• respond to ideas, questions, tasks or problems in a surprising way
• challenge conventions and their own and others' assumptions
• think independently.

Making connections and seeing relationships

Creative pupils think laterally and make associations between things that are not usually connected.
They:
• recognise the significance of their knowledge and previous experience
• use analogies and metaphors
• generalise from information and experience, searching for trends and patterns
• reinterpret and apply their learning in new contexts
• communicate their ideas in novel or unexpected ways.

Envisaging what might be

Creative pupils speculate about possibilities.
They:
• imagine, seeing things in the mind's eye
• see possibilities, problems and challenges
• ask 'what if?'
• visualise alternatives
• look at and think about things differently and from different points of view.


For example

In The creepy polar bear, pupils keep the image of a cold wind in their mind’s eye when experimenting with different sounds that reflect their thoughts and feelings about Antarctica. Open questioning helps them to think imaginatively and represent their mental picture through music.

Exploring ideas, keeping options open

Creative pupils explore possibilities, keep their options open and learn to cope with the uncertainty that this brings.
They:
• play with ideas, experiment
• try alternatives and fresh approaches
• respond intuitively and trust their intuition
• anticipate and overcome difficulties, following an idea through
• keep an open mind, adapting and modifying their ideas to achieve creative results.
For example

In The surfing ballerina, pupils experiment with different ways of producing movement using mechanisms and components, anticipating and overcoming difficulties along the way. They modify ideas as they reflect on their designs for moving toys and some continue to keep their options open and make changes right through to the making stage.

Reflecting critically on ideas, actions and outcomes

Creative pupils are able to evaluate critically what they do.
They:
• review progress
• ask 'is this a good...?' 'is this what is needed?'
• invite feedback and incorporate this as needed
• put forward constructive comments, ideas, explanations and ways of doing things
• make perceptive observations about originality and value.

(National Curriculum,2010)

Note:The picture is from this source.