Grow Creativity Reading Response |
Stop Animation |
Creativity is seemingly diminishing in our traditional style, "teach to the test", of instruction. All children learn in different ways and by adding FFOE (Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, and Elaboration) into teaching instruction, students will learn the materials needed and also keep their creativity. With this model, students can practice the circulation of many ideas and also how to register these ideas along with innovation. Creativity is a process that students must keep into their secondary education.
Fluency is the ability to generate lots of ideas, and by doing so, fluency helps create more ideas and keeps the process afloat. Each subject can call for different activities so that students practice fluency. For example, in mathematics, students may practice number sense, or the ability to see a number in multiple ways. Also, brainstorming builds fluency. Since I began group work in late elementary school, brainstorming has helped me think of many ideas and how to explain my ideas and thought processes to my fellow group members. Fluency is only the beginning step in the creativity wheel. Flexibility, similar to that of fluency, it the ability to see different ideas from different angles of perception. For example, if a group member explains the way they see the number 24 (number sense), you may use the practice of flexibility in order to see it from their angle. The practice of flexibility is important to creativity because it opens your mind to others' thoughts and ideas. Originality is the most important part of the FFOE in my opinion. Originality can be hard to find, and now more than ever, students must keep this quality in order to put their foot in the door of their future careers. Keeping originality circulating is important because of the unique ideas it brings out of students. For classroom use, teachers can use visuals in order to give students a new perspective to make even bigger and better ideas. The last part of the FFOE model is elaboration. Elaboration is filling in the gaps of an original idea. Although a student may have an amazing idea on their hands, it is important to think of all the aspects. For instance, if a student has thought of a new invention that could help the majority of his classmates, he needs to make sure the audience is fitting, the product is sellable, and be sure to think of all the small pieces. This step is important because it brings the idea in full circle. This makes students believe in their product or idea and puts the open-mind to the test. After reading this article, I fully believe that creativity is a cycle. It is important to keep this FFOE model in classrooms so that students do keep their creative minds afloat. Creative minds are what put students' feet in the door at a major company and allow them to prove their uniqueness to a future employer. Teachers can easily provide creativity boosting activities into group work as well as in lecture like showing visuals and class discussions. Creativity is in the mind and to be sure to keep this process in students' minds, teachers must allow themselves to step off the written path and follow on the FFOE model. |
For our Stop Animation, my group chose to teach The Water Cycle to a second grade class in California. We created, put together, and labeled our own scenes for our animation. The subject of our video is the water cycle, what the water cycle does for the Earth, and the process steps. The topic is the water cycle and we explained this cycle by detailing the steps of the water cycle. The topic is also second grade physical science where we used this particular Georgia Performance Standard to create our video: S2P1. Students will investigate the properties of matter and changes that occur in objects.
Our video helps students understand which step goes to the next and also gives the students an understandable and clear visual of the water cycle in sections and as a whole. Each scene was made by each member of the group and this creativity allows for students to see the objects, the sun, water, land, and rain, clearly and in a way they are familiar with, fun and happy. Making this video to appeal to second grade students allows for the students to relate to one another as well as us, the makers. We as a group had to understand the children's ways of thinking, behavior and learning methods in order to make a video in which they can understand. Student-generated videos and educational tools are more helpful because students can relate and have smilier ways of thinking which allows for better understanding of different subjects and topics. Our stop animation relates to OER (open educational resources) in that it was made by students, publicly shared, and related to students in the target audience; in this case, the target audience was a second grade class in California. I believe our stop animation will allow this class to relate to the animation, clearly understand the material, and better understand the water cycle. Our video: |