Thinking stems help students get started when they struggle to find just the right words to explain, describe, or clarify what they are thinking. One way to help students (and further engage English language learners or others who may need extra linguistic support in class discussion) is to provide thinking stems.
Thinking stems are used to:
• Give students a framework to explain their thinking
• Expose students to vocabulary often found in the process standards
• Provide language support for English learners
• Increase oral language proficiency
The cards provide questions/frames in English on the left side with Spanish cognates (words that look like and mean the same thing in Spanish) on the right side. Teaching cognate awareness accelerates vocabulary development by helping students use cognates in their primary language to help understand words in a second language.
Classroom set includes 28 each of the following cards: Analyze & Interpret; Apply; Cause & Effect; Compare, Classify, & Categorize; Create/Develop; Draw Conclusions; Evaluate; Generalize; Infer; Make Connections; Predict/Estimate; Sequence/Order; and Summarize (325 total).