Throughout the year, we have created icons to represent words and concepts. This activity allows students to use their creativity to form a relationship between two things you wouldn't recognize at first glance. This week, we took this critical thinking activity one step further in Language Arts. After reading a story about a dangerous mountain climbing expedition, the students were required to find three artifacts in my room to describe an aspect of what they read, and place them in a "mystery bag." Each student was given the opportunity to share the items with their table group, and to present their favorite artifact with the entire class. Some of the examples included white out to represent mistakes made on the mountain, gold glitter because life is precious like jewelry, and dice because the main character took a chance with his life by climbing the mountain.
Quick activities such as this provide gifted students opportunities to show higher order thinking. It can also help them make the transition to more abstract thinking as they create and analyze metaphorical tasks such as analogies. Overall, I believe icons and artifacts can be powerful tools in our classroom, as the students have demonstrated their creativity and the ability to form complex relationships between concepts and objects. If you have the opportunity, I suggest you try this at home with your child. I am sure you will be as intrigued with the results as I have been.
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