Thinking it Through

Developing Thinking and Language Skills Through Drama Activities

Gill Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135397050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Teaching should be exciting and creative but an overcrowded curriculum can make this hard for teachers to achieve. Help is at hand with these literacy and numeracy lesson plans that also cover language development, thinking skills, and drama.

Thinking it Through allows teachers to customize lesson plans to meet their own needs using the book's downloadable resources as well as assess pupils language abilty with handy photocopiable assessment worksheets. The book will help each child reach their full potential regardless of ability using ideas for differentiation and extension and structure lessons according to national curriculum objectives.

1 Language and thinking

Language is the ability to understand and use a structured system of communication. It is a component of the whole process of learning and is essential for accessing every aspect of the school curriculum. If a child has a difficulty in understanding or using language, it is likely to impact on everything that they do, in every facet of their lives.

Language skills are fundamental to literacy development – they are the foundation that underpins understanding, speaking and listening, communication of ideas, reading and writing. Children can think more effectively as they develop the language skills to structure their thought processes but, conversely, the development of thinking strategies helps with the acquisition of language skills, allowing the teacher to model language structures that the child can put to a purposeful use. By encouraging a child to be actively engaged in a learning situation you are helping them to plan and guide their own learning.

A study in America by Goodlad and Sizer (1984) showed that education has traditionally relied on a high percentage of ‘teacher talk’ as opposed to active involvement by pupils. This does not encourage the development of language and thinking but promotes a dependence on accepting information at face value without questioning it.

Where teacher talk is the main medium of transmission the child is effectively excluded from learning, to the frustration of both child and teacher.

(Nash et al. 2002)

In the classroom children can be helped to observe, compare, contrast, predict, sequence and use evidence to support their points of view. They need to learn to differentiate between fact and opinion and to internalise their thought processes through language, examining relationships and drawing conclusions about observed behaviour. By valuing children’s opinions and allowing them to discover things for themselves through questioning and experimentation we enable them to become more confident and more prepared to listen to and assimilate what others have to say.

The better we are at interpreting the data and challenging the assumptions behind them, the greater our chances of handling the riddles, the conundrums and the paradoxes that are so prevalent. Questions make it possible.

(Goodlad and Sizer 1984)

Early language development is linked with the development of cognitive, social and communication skills. Central to the development of language are the child’s abilities to focus attention, to learn through play and to form social interactions. Research into child development indicates that children are in the ‘acquisition’ stage of literacy learning up until the age of 8 years and it is during these early years that a child’s potential for developing reading skills and language processing are developed (Clay 2002). If we encourage a child in these early years of language acquisition they can be helped to make sense of the vast amount of sensory stimuli that invades their consciousness.

In order to comprehend the developmental process, it is useful to be aware of the initial stages of the normal pattern of speech and language development. This can only serve as a guideline, as every child progresses at a different pace, but it can demonstrate the basis of the acquisition of communication skills and the understanding of language concepts. It also demonstrates the extent to which other developmental areas, such as motor skills and cognition, influence the progress of speech and language development (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Speech and language development

■ At the age of 1 year the child responds to some verbal commands (such as ‘give it to me’) and attracts attention by using several ‘words’ which have a definite meaning. Understanding is developing at a faster rate than expressive ability as the child learns the names of familiar people and things but may not yet have the ability to say those words.

■ 1–2 years – In the course of the next 12 months the child begins to use words and gestures, uses ‘inflected jargon’ which imitates sentences but has little meaning to the listener, responds to simple commands and may refuse to do these by saying ‘no’.The child starts to use familiar early phrases – (‘bye-bye’ ‘all gone’), repeats single words that are said to him/her and asks for the toilet, food or drink.

■ At the age of 2–3 years the child asks questions (‘what’s that?’), talks in simple terms about immediate experiences and repeats much of what is said to him/her. He/she refers to self by using a pronoun (‘me go out’, ‘me want drink’) and vocalises readily. Speech and language at this age are part of the child’s ‘egocentric’ world where personal needs and the child’s immediate environment are the focus of attention (Piaget 1959).

■ At the age of 4–5 years the child increasingly communicates through speech and carries on long involved conversations. He/she can tell or re-tell a story, although this may be a mixture of real and imagined events, and is eager to find out how things work and what things mean. This is the age when children ask a lot of questions although they do not necessarily understand the explanations. The child is beginning to socialise more with other children and an increase in the child’s linguistic development occurs around this age – sentence structure is now sufficiently complex to allow the child to describe and abstract experiences, and vocabulary develops as the child becomes increasingly interested in listening and taking in information. He/she begins to use these skills to internalise thinking. The child begins to ‘think’ words as they are uttered and to develop a process of ‘planned’ speech as he/she moves from egocentric speech to more mature communication.

■ Between the ages of 5 and 6 years the child begins to develop an understanding of temporal concepts and learns to see things from another’s point of view. He/she starts to use language as an instrument to make judgements, to analyse and categorise and to draw on previous experience to inform actions and decisions. The rate of development and understanding of language concepts will have a direct influence on the child’s ability to think things through and make sense of the world around them.

Source: based on developmental profiles by A. Gesell, J. Lindon and C. Hood in Gesell 1966

If we are aware of what language skills are expected at specific ages and the sequence of their development, we are better equipped to underpin and support the process and provide activities that encourage and enrich that development. As teachers we need to provide children with the tools to enable them to develop enquiring minds and to have the language skills to acquire, extend and use their knowledge and experience in a purposeful context, thus reaching their potential throughout the curriculum.

We need thinking in order to make even better use of information.

(De Bono 1993)

The lesson plans in this book (see Chapters 5 and 6) are designed to target specific language skills and concepts as well as providing ways of teaching strategies for looking beyond the literal and for questioning and processing information. Children need to draw upon their experience, recalling previous information, making links between objects, events and behaviours, making comparisons and looking for similarities and differences and predicting possible outcomes. They need to accept that it is fine to make mistakes and that there is often more than one correct answer to an investigation. Children need to learn, understand and use the language related to this type of activity so that they can order and plan their own investigations and thus promote further learning. If children apply their learning in this way, their skills are used in a relevant and creative way and are directed by the children’s own desire to find out more.

Thinking activities

• Comparisons is a very adaptable teaching tool for lessons and reinforces the concept of exploring things beyond their literal presentation. Looking at two everyday objects and challenging children to find similarities and differences encourages them to look further and to investigate aspects of the objects that they would not normally bother with; and, by working with a partner or in a group, they use language to communicate their ideas that helps them to make sense of their findings. It can be used at the start of a project or at the conclusion. It can be used as a mental starter activity or as a plenary or stand on its own as a means of promoting investigation and discussion.

• Questions can be adapted to a variety of curricular activities and, once children have learned to ask questions out loud, they will begin to formulate their own questions when they approach new situations and new concepts. This helps to structure their internal thinking, using the language of questioning and the knowledge that by asking questions you find out more and more.

There have always been plenty of questions in schools, but most of them have come from the teacher, often at the rate of one question every 2–3 seconds. Unfortunately, these rapid fire questions are not the questions we need to encourage because they tend to be RECALL questions rather than questions requiring higher level thought. The most important questions of all are those asked by students as they try to make sense out of data and information. These are the questions which enable students to Make Up Their Own Minds.

(Postman and Weingartner 1975)

• Hot seating is a drama technique that has a place in most areas of the curriculum. A child can take the ‘hot seat’ and respond to questions about something he/she knows well or can take on another role and answer questions from a different perspective. The questions themselves are ways of probing and stimulating responses and children will quickly learn how they can phrase their questions to get the most effective and informative responses.

• What’s my picture? is another activity that can be adapted to different groups of children and different subjects. The skills involved can be differentiated according to the age and ability of the children, and the selected pictures can be related to the lesson being taught or to the vocabulary objectives of a literacy, numeracy or science lesson.

• Barrier games are infinitely adaptable and can be as simple as a sequence of six coloured cubes or as complex as a detailed structure or picture involving shapes, colours, positioning, patterns, etc.

• Let’s find out is an activity that can be done with any picture that has the potential to tell a story – again it involves questions and discussion about what the children see and can relate to their own experience and encourages them to go beyond the superficial image and look for clues to a more detailed and exciting story. This is a good way to start a topic. If the children have some idea of what they want to know, they can plan a learning journey to follow and then set about their investigation in a methodical way, taking charge of their own knowledge acquisition. The lesson or project can conclude with sharing what they have actually learned and how they achieved this knowledge.

• Thinking quiz – this is a good way of motivating a class, stimulating discussion and producing ideas for further development. The results of the quiz can be plotted into a mind map, which can then be used for individual story or poetry writing, collaborative writing or creative artwork. The quiz questions can be written to reflect a specific theme or lesson objective.

• ‘Jungle Adventure’ and ‘Space Voyage’ give children the opportunity to become involved in an imaginary situation and then to talk about their experiences. This can be the stimulus for a creative writing task or stand alone as a speaking and listening activity.

• ‘My friend says … ’ is a circle activity that encourages listening, recall and communication skills. The teacher can direct the focus of the activity according to the group of children, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Language and thinking
• 2. Thinking skills
• 3. Drama and thinking
• 4. Assessment and planning
• 5. Literacy lesson plans
• 6. Numeracy lesson plans
• 7. Starters and plenaries
• Conclusions
• References and further reading
• Resources