Light bulb moment....

     A few weeks ago I just had one of those fantastic "light bulb moments," when inspiration hit and an idea for a lesson became so very clear. I love when that happens...I just wish it happened more often!

      Anyways, I've been talking about the idea of being a "rock thinker" and a "flexible thinker" with some of my social skills students. These ideas stem from the amazing "Social Thinking" curriculum you can find by Michelle Garcia-Winner. My students and I discussed what a rock thinker might do versus a flexible thinker and also how this could impact the thoughts that others might have about us. We even role played a bit using some of the materials I found from Jill Kuzma on her website here.

    After all of that discussion, they still had a hard time thinking of ways to become a flexible thinker and strategies they could use to avoid being a "rock". It seemed that the concept of being flexible was a little tricky to understand. My thinking was that if I could provide a stronger visual to support what it meant to be "flexible", then maybe they would understand the concept better.

     So, this lead me to think, "How can I teach/show the idea of flexible?", "What material/object could I use to incorporate the idea the brain?"......and then all of a sudden it hit me. SILLY PUTTY! I remembered that when I was younger, I loved to use silly putty, flatten it out to copy from newspaper comic strip, and then stretch it out. I wanted to use this same idea to show my students how the brain can become flexible and stretch from something it was stuck on. Here's what it looked like in my room:

I found Silly Putty in the dollar toy section at Wal-Mart, so this activity was cheap and easy to do. First we drew things that our brains get stuck on. We used newspaper print paper and pencils so that the drawings would transfer. You can see in the picture above that one of my students gets stuck on Sonic the Hedgehog game.

Next, we spread out our Silly Putty and transferred our drawings on to it. We connected this with out brain being stuck on something.

Then we looked at what was stuck on our "brain." The kids loved this part. I felt like a speech magician for teaching them this!

Last, we talked about stretching, being flexible and how our brains can change too! Teaching success!

Overall, my students really seemed to enjoy this lesson. Not only were they engaged, but I felt like it really provided them with a better idea of what being a "flexible thinker" meant. Hopefully it sparked a "light bulb moment" in them as well!