How can you teach creativity?

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful... There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

(WPR program: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.)
Instead of answering a child's question ask, "Why do you think it was? What reasons do you think...?" Asking them to come up with different explanations and then to pick the best one. And that right there is a microcosm of the creative process. It's thinking divergently, coming up with as many different ideas and approaches to a problem as you can; and then the convergent step: picking the best thing and then proceeding with it. If you track that, that applies for whether you're going to start a business, write a novel, come up with a new public policy.

More here: read or listen.

Center for Creative Learning

On Organization

At the end of the day Graves came and stood in my doorway with his coat on, smiling.
"What are you smiling about?" I asked.
"I'm smiling at you," he said. "You know what makes you such a good writing teacher?"
Oh God, I thought. Here it comes: validation from one of the world's most famous writing teachers. In a split second I flipped through the best possibilities. Was he going to remark on the piercing intelligence of my conferences? My commitment to the kids? My sensitivity to written language?
"What?" I asked.
He answered, "You're so damned organized."

Nancie Atwell, In The Middle

I have finally realized that the most creative environments in our society are not the kaleidoscopic environments in which everything is always changing and complex.
They are, instead, the predictable and consistent ones: the scholar's library, the researcher's laboratory, the artist's studio. Each of these environments is deliberately kept predictable and simple because because the work are so unpredictable and complex.

Lucy Calkins, The Art of Teaching Writing

Twiter anyone?

30 Essential Twitter Tutorials

A Castle of Words

What ever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we've built, and keep adding new wings to all the time.

Northrup Frye

In order to foster an awareness of the patterns shared even by widely different works of literature, we need to provide children with diverse experiences of literature--with the simple and the complex, the old and the new, the foreign and the domestic, the tragic and the funny, even the good and the bad as we define them for ourselves.

Quote

Nurture your sense of what's possible. We cannot create what we cannot imagine.

Lucille Clifton

Stages of an Avid Reader

Carlson (1974)

A Metaphor

"Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his best knuckleball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down -- not even the pitcher, much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing."

from Chapter 27, Maniac Magee

Quotes

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Sir Isaac Newton

More Skills, Strategies, and Behaviors

List of skills and strategies from Still Learning to Read: Teaching Students in Grades 3-6.
by Franki Sibberson & Karen Szymusiak (subheadings mine).

Identity:

• Knowing yourself as a reader.
• Choosing books to match individual needs.
• Having conversations in a community of readers with an increasing level of sophistication about different types of texts and reading experiences.

Perseverance:

• Using skills and strategies to get through the hardest sections of a text.
• Having the skills to get through a text that is not interesting.
• Sustain interest and understanding throughout a challenging text.
• Trusting that texts that aren't immediately engaging might have value.

Flexibility

• Reading a variety of texts with a repertoire of tools for working through different text conventions, formats, and features.
• Using strategies flexibly for different kinds of texts.

Comprehension

• Understanding complex meaning.
  
• Reflecting on thinking and monitoring strategies and behaviors.
• Changing thinking while reading to revise predictions and clarify understanding.
• Keeping track of characters.

Summer Reading

More choices for summer reading after I finish the genre challenge.

Horn Book Fanfare winners.

Planet Esme's "Read-Aloud Resuscitation: Must Reads by the time you're 13"

Nancie Atwell's Center for Teaching and Learning, Kids Recommend page

New Book and DVD

Number Talks: Helping Children Build Mental Math and Computation Strategies, Grades K–5

3 computational Goals
accuracy (self explanatory - often the sole focus)
efficiency the ability to choose an appropriate, expedient strategy for a specific computation problem
flexibility the ability to use number relationships with ease
(I would add a fourth, communication.)

tip: with weekly fluency tests, ask students to solve all problems 2 ways.

Word Savvy: notes from Max Brand

Sound

• letters and letter sounds
• consonants
• short vowels
• long vowels
• blends and clusters
• single-syllable words

Pattern

• rimes
• r-controlled vowels
• syllables
• high-frequency words
• polysyllabic words
• stressed syllabels
• unstressed syllables
• drop the e and add -ing or -ed
• drop the y and add -ies or -ied

Meaning

• root words (or base words)
• affixes
• word origins
• word use
  

Logonauts

This always makes me smile.

Get Your Standards Here: Third Grade

Common Core Standards Initiative

English Language Arts

Reading: Literature

Reading: Informational Text

Reading: Foundational Skills

Writing

Speaking & Listening

Language


Mathematics

Introduction

Operations & Algebraic Thinking

Number & Operations in Base 10

Number & Operations - Fractions

Measurement & Data

Geometry

Skills and Strategies of Proficient Reading

Oh boy! Assessments

I'm reading Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Grades 3-5 by Lucy Calkins.
Text is supported by work from Columbia University's Teachers College Writing and Reading Project. I'm anxious to acquaint myself with their reading benchmarks. Of course, my lucky boys come to mind...

Upon further investigation:
Levels A-K require that you purchase a text set through Scholastic. Levels L-Z are regular trade book titles available from the library. Joe you're off the hook.

Quote of the Day

Lucy Calkins The Art of Teaching Reading

If our teaching is going to be an art, we need to remember that artistry does not come from sheer quantity of red and yellow paint or from the amount of clay or marble, but from the organizing vision that shapes the use of those materials. It's not the number of good ideas that will turn our teaching into something significant and beautiful, but the selection, balance, coherence, and design of those ideas.

Summer Challenge #1

Always start with a robin singing.

My current professional goal is to read a lot of third grade literature.
A lot probably needs to be narrowed.
How about a genre game?
Books Selected from "100 Children's Books that Belong in Every Library" by Elizabeth Bird

realistic fiction - Year of the Dog
fantasy - The Book of Three
science fiction - A Wrinkle in Time
mystery -
biography - Isaac Newton by Katherine Krull
nonfiction - The New Way Things Work
adventure - The Whipping Boy
historial fiction - The Watsons Go to Birmingham
poetry -

Summer Challenge #2

Where are all my professional books?

Two teachers, two houses, and too many books.
How to sort them?
Here's a stab from the Heinemann page:

Reading

• Assessment
• Children's Literature
• Comprehension
• Fluency
• Guided Reading
• Intervention
• Literature Circles/Book Discussions
• Phonics/Word Study
• Vocabulary

Writing

• Conferring
• Grammar/Conventions
• Mentor Texts
• Minilessons
• Spelling

Math

• Activities
• Arithmetic/Number Sense
• Assessment
• Curriculum
• Differentiated Instruction
• Foundations
• Fractions/Decimals/Percents
• Geometry
• Methods
• Multiplication/Division
• Staff Development

Teaching-General

• School Reform
• Teacher Renewal
• Teacher Research