Discovering Ancient Civilizations: Activities to Encourage Creative Thinking

This resource teaches students about archaeology and provides opportunities for exploring a variety of ancient civilizations. The open-ended activities extend students’ imagination and creativity and encourage students to examine their feelings and values. Specifically, they focus upon the cognitive and affective pupil behaviors that were described in Williams’ Model: fluent thinking, flexible thinking, original thinking, elaborative thinking, risk-taking, complexity, curiosity, and imagination. Students learn to recognize problems and to produce and consider a variety of alternate solutions to those problems. Teachers, therefore, should urge students to defer judgment of their ideas until they have produced many alternatives. They should also encourage them to let their imaginations run wild so that their ideas include clever, unusual alternatives as well as the more obvious ones. The open-ended exercises in this book were designed to extend the imagination and creativity of your students. There are 57 reproducible activities to stimulate your study of Ancient History.