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Recommended Reading
National Inventive Thinking Association:
Resource of Creative and Inventive Activities!Compiled by Dr. Elizabeth Rowland, Dr. Leonard Molotsky. Illustrated by Jon Pearson
Copyright © NITA, 1994. (291 pp.) Paper. Bibliographies
Available from: NITA, P.O. Box 836202, Richardson, TX 75083
214.301-3370
A handbook for recognizing, nurturing, and celebrating talent through inventive thinking.
We came home with a cool book about creating an environment that supports creative and inventive thinking and problem solving. The NITA Resource of Creative and Inventive Activities! is organized around eleven principles that characterize "inventors." These principles are presented as attributes and skills that can be recognized, nurtured, and celebrated. The principles reappear throughout the book whenever a suggested activity supports or develops a particular skill or habit of mind.
Chapter subjects include:
- Recognizing, nurturing and celebrating talent through inventive thinking.
- Exploring the inventiveness in everyone.
- Drawing, brainstorming, creative problem solving, searching for better solutions to problems.
- A step by step guide to sharing and using Bloom's Taxonomy (of educational objectives) in order to encourage self-directed problem solving and building the foundation for more complex thinking skills.
The book presents a variety of research-based models and criteria that will help creative classroom leaders devise inventive activities and projects. One of the most intriguing chapters, "Encouraging Thinking Skills Through Conversations With Children" describes six thinking skills that lend themselves to interpersonal exploration. The chapter's collaborators, Marge Korzelius and Marion Cañedo, have observed that while "[t]extbooks often include activities that may be classified as thinking skills...application of these skills is rarely taught outside the confines of a normal lesson." It is widely assumed that children will be able to independently use thinking skills but the authors have observed that this happens haphazardly at best. They suggest ways of starting discussions that allow kids to understand cause and effect, classification and relationships, sequencing and planning, making decisions, using words to clarify thinking, learning to generate questions.
The book presents ideas from a variety of practitioners, each with a different approach to fostering creativity in the classroom. Their combined expertise gives teachers research-based guidelines to the process of teaching thinking skills in a creative context. The book will also help align projects with objectives.
A bonus is the book's illustrations, cartoons that are amusing and clever. Another is the reference pages at the end of each chapter which contain useful reading and resource suggestions.
Copyright © November 1995 New Horizons for Learning, all rights reserved.
http://www.newhorizons.org
E-mail: info@newhorizons.orgFor permission to redistribute, please go to:
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