Critical Thinking Cheat Sheet from Wabisabi Learning.
This great resource looks at the who, what, where, when, why and how of critical thinking.

Sun West Critical Thinking 10-12 High School Guidebook - please use the table of contents to navigate the guidebook. Also, we invite you to share resources you think would be suitable for this guidebook with any of the authors of this guidebook.

Sun West Critical Thinking Middle Years 6-9 Guidebook - please use the table of contents to navigate the guidebook. Also, we invite you to share resources you think would be suitable for this guidebook with any of the authors of this guidebook.

Sun West Critical Thinking Elementary K-5 Guidebook - please use the table of contents to navigate the guidebook. Also, we invite you to share resources you think would be suitable for this guidebook with any of the authors of this guidebook.

This resource provides video about critical thinking (about 7 min). Students can then apply what they learn, visualize it and explore more links about it.
This is a great resourced for high school students to prepare for university!

My goal was to bring 21st Century Competences with the focus of critical thinking into my Gr. 2 Math classroom. I show a droodle – an abstract drawing. I ask students to take a few moments and think about what it could be. Then they can discuss with a partner, and finally share what they thought. Afterwards we have a discussion around “right” and “wrong” answers – which is a common way to think around math. No one is wrong – these are all good ideas that could answer the question: What could this be?

My goal was to have grade 5-8 students incorporate critical thinking in their reader response journals, where they respond to text read independently during Guided Reading stations. I feel reader response journals encourage students to apply strategies taught in class when reading independently to improve their understanding of a variety of text. Our SLIP goal for the past two years focused on reading strategies, so I was also trying to build on the work we were doing for the West Colony PLT.

In this specific project, the goal is to engage students in discussion and analysis of current events in a way that involved all students, regardless of confidence in speaking in front of peers. 

This resource examines what deeper learning can actually look like in a classroom. Helpful diagrams of what you will see in a classroom along the way are included.

INTRODUCTION
INSIDE THE CLASSROOM
• Applying Content Knowledge
• Working Collaboratively
• Communicating Clearly
• Thinking Critically 1
• Developing an Academic Mindset
• Learning Independently
GLOSSARY
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

ŇThatŐs my position and IŐm sticking to it!Ó After reading about the Korean War, students will take a position in response to an open-ended question, support their position, and evaluate that support.

PowerPoint and Google Slides are available as templates to create your dialogue.
This is a great way to discuss difficult and troubling topics in a safe and supportive manner - instead of avoiding them.
Run the template via Pear Deck to make it interactive.

Explicitly teach connotative and denotative language. (See notes & scanned advertisements, which are completed as a class – teacher directed - and handout, which is done in a small group and then corrected as a class). Students will then partner up, select an innocent everyday item, get it approved, and design a “safe” or “family friendly” advertisement for placement in an innocuous magazine such as Family Circle, Canadian Home Workshop, or Knitting World. Students then start thinking outside the box for what loaded language they can incorporate into their advertisement to appeal to readers’ humour and sell to a very different audience. These advertisements will be somewhat racier and more riské as they are designed to be placed in magazines such as Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, and the like. I then encourage students to complete the ads using an appropriate computer program, but this isn’t a set requirement. Some students are very artistic and prefer to free hand their work.

Project:
You are a teenager with an amazing idea for a new documentary that you are sure everyone will want to see! You just know that if this documentary gets picked up you will hit the big time. In order for this documentary to hit the big screen, you first have to pitch it to a big time Executive Director, and convince him/her that this film is worth the money.

For this assignment, students were asked a series of open-ended questions relating to the Civil Rights Movement. Students scanned QR Codes, which took them directly to the assignment. The prompts allowed students to think critically, while investigating what the Civil Rights Movement was, and predict how the events in To Kill a Mockingbird would have been different if the Civil Rights Movement had occurred prior to the setting of the book.  While researching, students were only allowed to use Sweet Search, a site that searches for only credible sources. Questions included: Who was Martin Luther King Jr? What was the Civil Rights Movement? Using specific examples from To Kill a Mockingbird, consider how the portrayal and treatment of African American people may have been different if the Civil Rights Movement had occurred before the events in the novel took place. 

In this writing mini unit we developed our Persuasive Writing Skills moving towards being able to write a
Before
- Discussion of prior knowledge of persuasive writing
During
- Watched a SMART exchange video on persuasive writing
- Reviewed understanding of and practiced doing some persuasive exercises
- Read various examples of persuasive writing and noted the differences and similarities. (Also, noting the variety of writing dress-ups; so that we can hear the persuasive words.)
- Co-constructed criteria for the writing process of persuasive writing.
- Students created their own persuasive paragraph writing examples.
- Learned how to improve so the writing incorporated the specific writing strategy and dress-ups so that the listener, reader could hear the conviction of being persuaded.
- Students then chose one of their samples to create a power point presentation for class.
After
- Analyzed the writing using the criteria together as a class. Using the feedback we will created another piece of persuasive writing. The final goal: moving towards the five paragraph essay process/product.

This activity was designed to be used in the ELA B30 Distance Learning Course on Moodle. It could easily be adapted to use within a face-to-face classroom. The ability for students to assess their own writing and reflect on their strengths and weaknesses is an important component of the ELA B30 course. Currently, the AR activities are embedded within the section work in the course but many students miss doing these reflections or don’t see the connections between assessing their responses and how this leads to better learning in the future. The new assessment and reflection package is designed to help students set goals that they wish to work towards in ELA B30 and have them measure how well they are achieving those goals.

I have been doing expert writing with the older students for a few years now as an independent English Language Arts project while I am working with the younger students. However, I have been disappointed with the variety and creativity in presentations. I give them a list of possible formats and they choose the topic they are interested in researching and how they want to present what they have learned. Only 1 or 2 have been brave enough to deviate from the traditional written report, or poster. My plan was to do a variety of creativity projects from the Destination Imagination series to foster creativity and get them in the right frame of mind before doing their projects. I insisted that they had to choose a format other than a written report, or poster.

Throughout the year I have used this as a review for the end of each unit. I create five or six critical thinking questions that apply what we have been learning about. I print them on color paper and spread them around the room. I pair the students up, and have they move about the room solving the questions. I only have ten students in my class so I’m fortunate to have only five pairs at a time. I usually pair them up as sort of a strong and weak combination. This is an attempt to have them collaborate on the problems while using critical thinking.

MAKE CURRICULUM COME ALIVE
DESIGN IN AUGMENTED REALITY AND SHARE YOUR CREATIONS.

You are able to sign up for a free teacher account (with limited use) but there are also full accounts available for a cost (9.99 a month or 2-3 dollars a student depending on how you sign up).

Social injustice occurs every day all over the world. In this lesson, students research a few historical examples of social injustice, including the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, and Japanese internment.