Blooms

We all want our children to use necessary critical thinking skills. Thanks to Bloom’s Taxonomy, we can all help to develop and strengthen our children’s thinking skills. Benjamin Bloom was an education psychologist who researched the types of questions that teachers asked and classified them into 6 levels. This is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. He found that teachers were more likely to ask questions at the Knowledge level which is the lowest level of thinking skill.

As a school we have embraced Bloom’s as our language of learning. It is used to direct our planning, questioning and classroom display’s.

As teachers, parents and carers, we can encourage our children to think for themselves. We want them to have the skills necessary to listen, analyse and interpret the information that will be a constant part of their lives. Memory and understanding are part of this process, but to succeed in further processing, this flow of knowledge requires higher level techniques.

Here are some examples of how to use Bloom’s Taxonomy with your child at home:

Applying: Ask your child how they would solve a given real-life problem. Can they use their learning from school for example, using a strategy taught to subtract spending from their pocket money.

Analysing: Can they pull things apart to see how they work? Encourage them to conduct an interview or survey. eg. Why do so many fairy stories have multiples of 3, such as 3 bears, 3 little pigs. Can we find any with two?

Evaluating: Ask your child to form and defend an opinion on a subject. For example, can they evaluate a character’s actions in a story, or debate why they should or shouldn’t do something.