Thinking With Standards Resources

Educators today face many pressures and competing demands. On the one hand, it is important for students to meet high standards in many basic academic content areas, including reading and language, science, mathematics, and social studies. There is also wide recognition that today’s world demands individuals who can think creatively and critically, solve problems, and manage change. These are not opposing or incompatible expectations, however; we believe that content and thinking tools can be linked effectively as an important element of quality instruction. We offer a wide selection of practical activities that help you link basic tools for creative thinking and critical thinking with specific academic content standards.

Click here to learn more about the background and rationale for these Activities.

The Thinking With Standards Activities

By applying the practical activities in this series, you will be able to address the important skills students will need in the workplace of the future, respond to content standards, and guide students in thinking creatively and critically at the same time. There are 10 elementary (grades 3-5) activities in each of these four curriculum areas: Language Arts, Science, Social Studies, and Mathematics, and also 10 middle level (grades 6-8) activities in each of the same four curriculum areas. Each activity includes a brief Teacher Guide (two or three pages) for the activity, and a reproducible Student Page. Purchase of the activity includes permission to print or copy as many copies of the Student Page as you wish for classroom use with your students.The cost of each Activity is $2.50. You can also purchase each set of 10 activities (all ten activities for one subject area for either Elementary or Middle level) at the reduced price of $20.00 (a saving of 20%).

FREE Sample Activities

We offer four free sample activities that you may download by clicking here. Two are elementary level, and two are for the middle school level. Two relate to Language Arts and two relate to Mathematics. Each activity links a specific content standard with a tool for generating ideas (the samples use the Attribute Listing and Morphological Matrix tools) or a tool for focusing ideas (using the ALoU tool and the Paired Comparison Analysis or PCA tool); the samples also include teacher instructions and a reproducible student page, illustrating the format of all our TWS activities.