Developing Academic Thinking Skills in Grades 6-12: A Handbook of Multiple Intelligence Activities

Many classroom tasks and texts require additional cognitive skills beyond the reading strategies usually described in the literature on content area reading. This book will help you design effective activities and assessments that foster the academic thinking skills your students need to understand challenging content area concepts taught in school. The chapters are organized into three parts. Part I explains the importance of developing academic thinking skills and the key role that academic language plays in this development. Part I also discusses the key components of assessment and instruction as they relate to the development of academic thinking. Analyzing; Comparing; Categorizing and Classifying; Identifying Cause and Effect; Problem Solving; Persuading; Empathizing; Synthesizing; Interpreting; Evaluating; Communicating; Applying; Each skill-based chapter describes an academic thinking skill, offers a list of academic language terms related to the skill, and provides activities that you can use to strengthen students' use of the skill. All the activities tap into students' multiple intelligences; four intelligences, in particular, are emphasized - social, visual, kinesthetic, and musical - because of their proven effectiveness in how children learn. activities in chapters 3-14. The appendixes offer additional multiple intelligence activities, a list of possible questions and controversial topics for use in classroom discussions and in several of the book's activities, and familiar songs for designing music-based activities. Use this book to provide your adolescent students with the academic thinking skills and language required to comprehend the content area texts they read.