Challenging Minds (PDF)

All too often, gifted and advanced learners are just accelerated, without fueling the creative thinking and problem solving that they are capable of. This book bursts with thrilling, mind-stretching enrichment activities designed to stimulate higher level thinking for gifted students in grades 5-12.

Challenge the learners in your classroom to explore and evaluate assumptions they make about their world; conduct surveys about current, hot issues and analyze the results; or solve complex logic mysteries in small learning groups. These activities and lessons vary in length from one class period to several weeks, and have enough activities to be used all year.

Skills are developed by using:

• creative research ideas,
• creative thinking tasks,
• daring debates,
• blueprints for business, and
• philosophical problems.

For example, in one activity, students are asked to review various classification systems from areas as diverse as biology and history. Then, they discuss and identify the various steps needed to create a classification system. Next, students consider and discuss various examples about humor, then create, test, and evaluate their own classification system for humor. Finally, students produce their own examples of humor and classify them according to the system they have created.

One of the features that makes this book outstanding is that each activity has been field-tested for at least five years in secondary classrooms. The book and each lesson in it provide in-depth information and advice for the classroom teacher.

Grades 5-12