Have some “Blooming” fun!
Wednesday, February 9th, 2005 Are you familar with Bloom’s Taxonomy? I was teaching a class of Juniors and Seniors how to create a fun,
interactive activity on PowerPoint using question starter words for the six categories of Blooms. A professor had asked me to show them a good PowerPoint activity. They would be using photos and creating callouts to make little speech bubbles.I assumed they were familar with Blooms. My mistake! Not one of the students had a clue. Well, I had my work cut out for me. One student said she wondered what we were going to be doing and assumed it must have something to do with income tax. Yep, I had a ways to go. Not to be deterred I scrambled and did a quick lesson on Bloom’s Taxonomy. Oh, for more time with this group! They ended up having fun and I had fun showing them some of my elementary students work with Blooms. They were amazed!
I have found that you can improve thinking skills at any age using good questions for critical thinking. Students can even have fun with it while they are learning. Let’s not limit ourselves only to who,what, where, when and why. How about describe, summarize, review, interpret, apply, examine, categorize, predict, create, decide, conclude and recommend for starters? Students are up for the challenge but we have to do the teaching, the introducing, the developing of good activities to get them engaged.
Technology can shine here. In the elementary school where I taught we used Inspiration and developed a Jeopardy game filled with questions created from key question words from Blooms. Students love this activity and they are really developing good thinking skills.They create the questions and then switch computers and play the game someone else has created. They became little pros creating PowerPoint presentations where they asked each other and answered high level question. We used Microsoft Publisher and created mini posters with great backgrounds that set off quality questions developed by the students.
They love striving to make questions that push their thinking beyond rote recall. You can do this in any content area. You can do it with,many technology programs.
Weblogs are perfect places for sprouting good thinkers! My fifth graders acted out a skit to get to know the Bloom’s categories. Now I’m not worried about them memorizing definitions but I do want them to become better thinkers by “bumping” their thinking up a level or two. Students can and do rise to the occasion. Keep them engaged and thinking! Use weblogs to let them write about all their good thinking. Believe me, Bloom’s Taxonomy is user-friendly so go have some “Blooming” fun!