Max the Magician

Throughout this year our kindergarten, first, second and third grade students have been taught a variety of thinking skills by either Ms. Ferriola or myself. We call these lessons PETS, which stands for Primary Education Thinking Skills.  In these lessons, the student are introduced (or reintroduced) to the different characters that live in Crystal Pond Woods.  Each friend has their own unique way of thinking.  As the students advance through the grade levels, they learn more about how the variety of thinking works and how they work together.  Here is list of the friends that live in Crystal Pond Woods and their type of thinking:

Convergent Thinkers:
Dudley the Detective (deductive thinking)
Sybil the Scientist (analytical thinking)

Divergent Thinkers:
Isabel the Inventor (divergent with ideas)
Yolanda the Yarn-spinner (divergent with words)

Visual Thinker:
Max the Magician

Evaluative Thinker:
Jordan the Judge

Recently in first grade,  I taught several lesson about Max the Magician. Max is a visual thinker. In visual thinking, we use our eyes and brains together, we look at things in different ways and we visualize and manipulate objects in our head.  Personally, visual thinking is hard for me. But as you can see in the pictures below from Mr. Gordon's class, our first graders have no problem with Max and his visual thinking.

The assignment was to recreate Max the Magician on the other side of the paper.  The idea is to use grid to help guide in the reproduction.  I was VERY impressed with the students' drawings and use of visual thinking.

Continuing the develop the whole child...