Search

What and how young children are thinking are typically expressed and shared at home and school through verbal and written modes of communication. As a visual language framework conceived and developed by David Hyerle, Thinking Maps® offers an additional way for learners to represent their ideas by visually mapping their fundamental patterns of thinking. The authors offer a wide range of materials, strategies, and evidence-based practices for implementing Thinking Maps (and the metacognitive framing strategy that each map promotes) in ways that are developmentally appropriate, culturally responsive, and more inclusive with the full range of pre-K–second-grade children. Since 1990, Thinking Maps have been implemented by teachers in over 15,000 schools across the United States and around the world, including countrywide implementation in Malaysia. This guide provides a whole-child approach with practical ideas and best applications for working with emergent readers and writers across developmental domains, curricula, and executive function.Book Features:Promotes systematic support of every students'cognitive development in whole schools (pre-K–2).Demonstrates how to use visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic activities and materials to increase student engagement.Recommends Universally Designed Learning strategies to ensure full access and inclusion with diverse learners and children with disabilities.Includes graphically designed examples of Thinking Maps across content areas.Provides examples of student work, lesson planning ideas, and curriculum design based on cognitive education.Links language and thinking in everyday classroom learning for individual and cooperative learning.

A Teacher's Guide to Philosophy for Children provides educators with the process and structures to engage children in inquiring as a group into ‘big'moral, ethical and spiritual questions, while also considering curricular necessities and the demands of national and local standards.Based on the actual experiences of educators in diverse and global classroom contexts, this comprehensive guide gives you the tools you need to introduce philosophical thinking into your classroom, curriculum and beyond. Drawing on research-based educational and psychological models, this book highlights the advantages gained by students who regularly participate in philosophical discussion: from building cognitive and social/emotional development, to becoming more informed citizens. Helpful tools and supplementary online resources offer additional frameworks for supporting and sustaining a higher level of thinking and problem-solving among your students.This practical guide is essential reading for teachers, coaches and anyone wondering how you can effectively teach philosophy in your classroom.

This accessible text will show students and class teachers how they can enable their pupils to become critical thinkers through the medium of picturebooks. By introducing children to the notion of making-meaning together through thinking and discussion, Roche focuses on carefully chosen picturebooks as a stimulus for discussion, and shows how they can constitute an accessible, multimodal resource for adding to literacy skills, while at the same time developing in pupils a far wider range of literary understanding.By allowing time for thinking about and digesting the pictures as well as the text, and then engaging pupils in classroom discussion, this book highlights a powerful means of developing children's oral language ability, critical thinking, and visual literacy, while also acting as a rich resource for developing children's literary understanding. Throughout, Roche provides rich data and examples from real classroom practice.This book also provides an overview of recent international research on doing ‘interactive read alouds', on what critical literacy means, on what critical thinking means and on picturebooks themselves. Lecturers on teacher education courses for early years or primary levels, classroom teachers, pre-service education students, and all those interested in promoting critical engagement and dialogue about literature will find this an engaging and very insightful text.

The activities and suggestions in The Little Book of Sequencing Skills will help you and the children in your care to explore a range of creative ways to develop sequencing skills. The ability to sequence events and objects is essential for young children's learning and the ability to put thoughts and actions into sequence is important for the development many competencies. Sequencing skills are often associated with communication and literacy but the ability to predict'what will come next,'whether it be in a mathematical pattern, following instructions, understanding patterns of letters and sounds, or understanding the consequences of actions is imperative across all areas of learning. There are many ways of developing sequencing skills. This book hopes to offer the early years practitioner a variety of practical, creative ways to help with the understanding, recognition and manipulation of sequences and to do so within the context of a variety of areas of learning.