Lesson Idea | Creativity & Creative Thinking

Lesson plans and activities for teaching about inventions by increasing creativity and creative thinking. The lesson plans are adaptable for grades K-12 and were designed to be done in sequence.

Teaching Creativity & Creative Thinking Skills

When a student is asked to "invent" a solution to a problem, the student must draw upon previous knowledge, skills, creativity, and experience. The student also recognizes areas where new learnings must be acquired in order to understand or address the problem. This information must then be applied, analyzed, synthesized, and evaluated. Through critical and creative thinking and problem-solving, ideas become reality as children create inventive solutions, illustrate their ideas, and make models of their inventions. Creative thinking lesson plans provide children with opportunities to develop and practice higher-order thinking skills.

Throughout the years, many creative thinking skills models and programs have been generated by educators, seeking to describe the essential elements of thinking and/or to develop a systematic approach to teaching thinking skills as part of the school curricula. Three models are illustrated below in this introduction. Although each uses different terminology, each model describes similar elements of either critical or creative thinking or both.

Models of Creative Thinking Skills

Benjamin Bloom
Calvin Taylor
Isaksen and Treffinger
The models demonstrate how creative thinking lesson plans could provide an opportunity for students to "experience" most of the elements described in the models.

After teachers have reviewed the creative thinking skills models listed above, they will see the critical and creative thinking and problem-solving skills and talents that can be applied to the activity of inventing. The creative thinking lesson plans that follow can be used across all disciplines and grade levels and with all children. It can be integrated with all curricular areas and used as a means of applying the concepts or elements of any thinking skills program that may be in use.

Children of all ages are talented and creative. This project will give them an opportunity to develop their creative potential and synthesize and apply knowledge and skills by creating an invention or innovation to solve a problem, just as a "real" inventor would.

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