Creative Curriculum Extenders

Differentiated Projects for the Language Arts Classroom (Grades 3-5)

Laurie Stolmack Eaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781593639235
• eBook ISBN: 9781000491371
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Creative Curriculum Extenders: Projects for the Language Arts Classroom (grades 3-5) is an easy-to-use source of reading and writing curriculum projects that help teachers differentiate instruction. Each page has four in-depth, open-ended, and varied project choices, allowing students to pick a project that fits their needs, ability level, and learning style. Some of the categories that the projects cover are novels, poetry, fairy tales, autobiographies, descriptive communications, nonfiction, and more. Each page is graphically interesting and perfect to post on a bulletin board or in a learning center for enrichment or extra credit choices.Grades 3-5

Introduction

21st-Century Skills for Reading, Writing, and Communicating

DOI: 10.4324/9781003233909-1

Today’s students need a repertoire of knowledge and skills that are more diverse, complex, and integrated than those of any previous generation. Communication is a very important aspect of reading and writing, and effective communication skills are necessary in students’ everyday lives. Such skills are essential to 21st-century learners, whether they go on to college, the workforce, or technical training. Creative Curriculum Extenders: Differentiated Projects for the Language Arts Classroom takes these 21st-century skills into consideration in its array of activities. These skills enable students to learn and set goals independently and collaboratively. The categories below summarize the skills that students must develop in today’s 21st-century classrooms and were informed by my own district’s standards (Colorado Department of Education, 2009) and by the standards put out by the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English (1996).

Critical Thinking and Reasoning

In order for students to be successful and powerful readers, writers, and communicators, they must incorporate critical thinking and reasoning skills. Students need to be able to successfully argue a point, justify reasoning, evaluate for a purpose, infer to predict and draw conclusions, problem solve, and understand and use logic to inform critical thinking.

Information Literacy

The student who is information literate accesses information efficiently and effectively by reading and understanding content from a range of informational texts and documents, both traditional and electronic. This involves evaluating information critically and thoroughly and distinguishing among facts, points of view, and opinions.

Collaboration

Reading, writing, and communicating must encompass collaboration skills. Students should be able to collaborate with each other in multiple settings: in peer groups, one on one, in front of an audience, in large- and small-group settings, and with people from backgrounds different from their own.

Self-Direction

Students who read, write, and communicate independently portray self-direction by using metacognitive skills. These important skills are a learner’s automatic awareness of knowledge and ability to understand, control, and manipulate his or her own cognitive processes. These skills are important not only in school, but also throughout life, enabling the student to learn and set goals independently.

Invention

Invention is one of the key components of creating an exemplary writing piece or synthesizing information from multiple sources. Invention takes students to a higher level of metacognition while they explore literature and write about their experiences by forming new ideas.

Creativity and Divergent Thinking

Creative Curriculum Extenders provides students with the opportunity to look at unique situations and come up with alternative outcomes by combining research with creative thinking. The book poses real prompts—prompts that have many possible answers—that lead to discovery, better insight, and active involvement in subject matter. The book presents prompts that ask students to consider cause-and-effect relationships, as well as prompts that demand a wide variety of responses and activities—including discussion, debate, prototype, dramatization, and other forms of artistic expression. These activities offer opportunities for students to demonstrate fluent, flexible, original, and elaborate thinking.

Fluency

The activities in this book foster fluency, or the ability to think of or consider multiple ideas and possibilities. With the menus in this book, students are encouraged to come up with alternate ideas, answers, solutions, and outcomes.

Flexibility

Flexibility—the ability to think of varied ideas—is encouraged by the activities in this book, which prompt students to look at things from different angles and perspectives.

Originality

Students, through the menus in this book, develop their ability to think of unusual ideas. Creative Curriculum Extenders encourages students to produce novel responses and ideas.

Elaboration

By completing the activities found in this book, students will develop elaboration, or the ability to add to ideas in order to improve them. This book challenges students to explain their ideas or include additional information.

Evaluating Creative Thinking

The rubric on page 7 can be used to evaluate students with regard to the facets of creativity discussed here. As with any rubric, it will be helpful to thoroughly review the components in question with students prior to scoring, grading, or evaluation.

The Importance of Reading, Writing, and Communicating

English Language Arts Standards

In recent years, many school districts have moved toward an integrated model of literacy that includes reading, writing, and communicating. Literacy building has become a shared responsibility for all content-area teachers. Research skills are now integrated across the standards and across the grade levels in many school districts. There has been a big shift in the standards in that the emphasis, particularly in the upper grades, is now on writing to argue, inform, and explain—writing, in other words, with purpose.

Creative Curriculum Extenders was written with consideration of all content areas. Research skills, increasing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author's Note
• Introduction
• Autobiography
• Researching and Informing
• Poetry
• Novels
• Fairy Tales
• Nonfiction Communications
• Descriptive Communications
• Narrative Communications
• Persuasive Communications
• Expository Communications
• References
• About the Author
• Common Core State Standards Alignment