Kinder Begins Detective Thinking

On Monday, the Kinder class worked on making inventions out of a bunch of materials that I put on the table.  I asked them to imagine what they would like to find at the end of a rainbow instead of a pot of gold, and they tried used their Inventor Thinking to create their ideas with boxes and various other items.  While I helped some of the students work on their inventions, the other students played an iPad game called “Pettson’s Inventions.”

Friday, the students learned about a different type of thinking – Detective Thinking.  With Detective Thinking, one uses clues to find one right answer.  They did a few activities using Detective Thinking, including one where I gave them clues about animals and they had to guess the animal I was describing.  A few of them are still learning to combine all of the clues instead of just guessing based on one clue.  We will do some more logic puzzles and games next week to practice that.

Of course, the highlight of every class is our “Go Noodle” time!  The students like to take a Brain Break to do a little dancing in class, and we use the “Go Noodle” website to keep track of our minutes of physical activity.  We all have a good time dancing to “I Like to Move It!”