Cultivate Your Creativity By Thinking Outside of the Box

This unit will help to motivate and improve students’ performance with problem solving, applying problem solving strategies, and selecting the most appropriate solution strategies to obtain optimum solutions to problems and to help to close the math gap. In order for students to think outside of the “box”, it is imperative to teach problem solving through extensive time, spread throughout the week, and on a daily basis throughout the curriculum. This will help to develop critical thinking skills, enhance the schools’ curriculum, and provide some fun for students. This unit will also be integrated with writing and communication.

This unit is written for students in the 6th and 7th grade. These students have ninety minutes block periods for mathematics on a daily basis. . I intend to use various problem- solving strategies and engage students to apply these to think outside of the box. Problems included in this unit will be discrete math where students can use various strategies to figure out the advantages and disadvantages of each before choosing an approach. Ultimately, this unit will enable students to find the solution to a problem and become critical thinkers.

In order to have students thinking outside of the box, this unit will include brain teasers, and problems that are required to use problem solving strategies such as making tables, making organized lists, looking for patterns, guess and check, drawing pictures or graphs, working backwards or solving simpler problems.