Mapua School Thinking Skills Group (2006)

We had to invent something to turn used water into fresh water that can be drunk again!

Check out this slideshow that shows some of our amazing inventions!


| View Show | Create Your Own

This week we looked at the "What if...?" Thinkers Key. We had fun making up our very own "what if's" and testing our buddies to see what they thought.

We have an interesting "What if" activity for homefun about having a cosmic Christmas on another planet with aliens.... we will post up some of our best stories next week :)

Posted by Rachel Boyd at Wednesday, December 06, 2006 | Permalink

First we shared our question key questions, some of our favourites were:

Answer: Water
Q: What runs but cannot walk? (Kelly)
Q: What comes from clouds? (Peter)
Q: What is H2O? (Molly & Mac)

Answer: Ice
Q: What is frozen water? (Bethan)
Q: What melts into water? (Hannah)
Q: What is really cold? (Tait)

Answer: Steam
Q: What comes out of a boiling pot? (Lauryn & Tait)
Q: What is evaporating water? (Hannah)
Q: What is the only water you can't see? (Bethan)
Q: What fogs up the bathroom mirror? (Molly)
Q: What is the gas that comes out of water? (Peter)

We did these example double bubbles as a group. Have a look at all the neat things we thought of to compare one animal to the other!


This week for Homefun we have a double bubble map to create: comparing steam and liquid. This should prove challenging... take your time and work on it over several days :)

Posted by Rachel Boyd at Monday, November 20, 2006 | Permalink

Well done Thinking Skills kids, I really enjoyed the great discussion we had today over last week's homefun task. I agree that it would take some getting used to, but recycling water is definetly something important that we may have to look into for the future!

Today we looked at another one of Tony Ryan's Thinkers Keys.
Previously we had used his Alphabet Key.

Today we looked at the "Question Key"
It was a bit of a challenge for us today because the question key confronts students with an ANSWER and they have to suggest questions associated with the answer.

We started as a group brainstorming questions that would go with the answer of "Mapua School" and then we worked in pairs. Each pair chose an answer and set about creating questions that could go with it.
This proved challenging because it is hard to ensure that the answer is exact. For example: "What is the most beautiful, flying creature?" - is the answer only butterflies!

For homefun this week you need to think about the questions that could lead to "Water", "Ice" and "Steam" as being the answers.
I can't wait to see what you think of next week!

Posted by Rachel Boyd at Monday, November 13, 2006 | Permalink

Today we met once again in the afternoon while the rest of the syndicate were in singing. We all brought along our "Making a Decision" homefun sheets so we could share our ideas.

Our issue that we had to think about was "We should all drink water that has been cleaned, treated and recycled."


At the end most people decided it was a good idea provided the water doesn't have lots of chemicals in it!

Posted by Rachel Boyd at Monday, November 06, 2006 | Permalink

Firstly, well done on your Homefun from last week, I really enjoyed reading all of your great thoughts about water! It's great that you can stretch your minds and think in SIX different ways about the one topic!

Today we had a great time sharing our thoughts and playing the attributes games from Think Shop. We are getting very good... next week we will play the game as snap and see just how good we are!

We then talked about making decisions... we make many decisions everyday... some as small and as simple as what shoes or clothes to wear! This week we had an interesting topic to think about concerning water...

Today group members were given a "Making a Decision" sheet. The topic we are trying to think about is: "We should all drink water that has been treated, cleaned and recycled". Our initial thoughts were that we wouldn't like to be drinking recycled toilet water!!! We will see how we all think about the idea after we have carefully considered the issue using both yellow and black hat thinking.

Posted by Rachel Boyd at Wednesday, November 01, 2006 | Permalink

I hope you all had a lovely LONG weekend!
We are not having a thinking skills session this week because of Labour Day on Monday :(
However... we do have some homefun to do so we can all be ready to go for our next session on Monday.


This week we are using Edward De Bono's 6 Thinking Hats to think in many different ways about water.
With each different coloured hat you need to think in a different way:

Black hat - negative/bad points

Yellow hat - positive/good points

White hat - information

Green hat - creative new ideas

Red hat - feelings about the idea

Blue hat - thinking about the idea

If you haven't already got a sheet you can download one here.

Good luck, I hope this encourages you to think in SIX different ways!

DUE MONDAY!

Posted by Rachel Boyd at Tuesday, October 24, 2006 | Permalink

Posted by Rachel Boyd at Wednesday, October 18, 2006 | Permalink