Meet The Blooms Bunch: How I Increased My Students Higher-Order Thinking Skills using Characters for Revised Bloom's Taxonomy

As a newer teacher I find myself always looking up which questions/activities fall under what level of higher-order thinking. While looking up action verbs for each level of thinking I would find repeating verbs in multiple levels and I think things like, "Ok, so is comparing ideas analyzing or evaluating?" I got so tired of being confused that I borrowed these two books from a small collection of teacher resource books at my school before I headed off to Spring Break. (Yes, I know I'm a nerd). I now have a better understanding of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy, but I felt like I needed a cheat sheet that was directly from the source. That is how The Blooms Family was created.

Meet Christie the Creator, Evan the Evaluator, Anna the Analyzer. They are the big sibs in the Blooms family (aka the higher-order thinkers). The lil' sibs (aka the lower-order thinkers) include Adam the Applier, Ursula the one who Understands and Robert the one who Remembers. I created a poster set featuring each character that includes the action verbs for each higher-order thinking level. 

My 4th graders love them. It makes each level easy to understand for both my students and I. I give myself a lot of practice with each level, because I now refer to the posters when I am leading a discussion, or modeling a think-aloud. Sometimes when I'm asking questions about a story, my students will request an "Evan" question or an "Anna" question, which means they want me to challenge their thinking. I can't tell you how much of an increase my students are using their higher-order thinking skills, and it's fun for them!

They have "adopted" the Blooms into our classroom family. I'm getting so much practice because the posters serve as a reminder to incorporate more higher-order thinking activities into my lessons and they serve as my reference guide. 

I am so pleased with the positive impact The Blooms Family has had on my students and myself as a professional, that I'm featuring these for $1 in my Teachers Pay Teachers store until April 6th at ll:59pm. Snag the early bird special now. Click the picture, or click HERE to go straight to my store.

Make sure while you're there you pick up my FREE ELA CCSS Aligned Graphic Organizers:

Click HERE for this Freebie!

Happy Pinning (& thinking! lol)