Creativity and Thinking Skills Integrated into a Science Enrichment Unit on Flooding

Floods that used to happen every hundred years are now occurring more frequently. Human influences on the damage inflicted by flooding need to be well-understood by future voters and property-owners. Therefore, the timely topic of flooding was used as the focus of a special multi-grade enrichment short course taught by two university education professors for 26 preK-8th grade high-achieving and creative students. During the course, students listened to guest speakers (city council member, meteorologist, and environmentalist), watched two flood-related videos, read books on floods, viewed electronic presentations related to dams and recent floods, discussed causes, effects, and mitigations of flooding, and devised creative games from recycled materials to teach peers about flood concepts. The de Bono CoRT Breadth thinking skill system was used to organize many of the course activities. The flood lesson activities were relevant to these students who had experienced a flood of the city’s river the previous year and challenged students more than their typical classroom activities, an important finding considering that many gifted students drop out of school because of irrelevant and non-demanding class work. The course broadened students’ knowledge of floods and assisted them in thinking beyond the immediate situation