Teacher Review: Think-ets Teacher Edition
by Karen Luciana

Think-ets Teacher Edition is a collection of little objects, such as a miniature book, a hammer, scissors, or a tree, that you find in everyday life.  You use the pieces to play games that involve remembering and thinking.

For example, in the activity,What’s Missing, 5 or more trinkets are selected and placed in front of players.  All players observe the trinkets.  The person who selected the trinkets to observe gets to remove one.  Players guess which one was taken away.

In, What Were They, You must hold a trinket with your eyes closed and use your sense of touch to guess the piece.

There is another game called Who’s Last. In this one, the trinkets are laid in rows and players must take turns picking up as many as they want from a row. The object is to not be the player who picks up the last trinket, so if you get stuck picking up the last one you lose. The person directly before you, the one who forced you to pick up the last trinket, wins.

A fourth activity is What’s Your Story.  Players start with any trinket. One person starts the story and the next players add on to the story.  The object is to use 5 or more trinkets and make them involved in story.

We experimented with the many activities suggested by Think-ets in my fifth grade classroom.

Here is what we liked:

Fifth grade students liked that the story game is interesting because they would not know what the other person would imagine.  They found such an activity challenging, and fun.  They liked the feeling of wondering what may happen, what their opponent would imagine. There was an overwhelming positive response to this story activity. They found it interesting to use ordinary objects and make them have qualities, or make them appear alive, similar to Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. They liked the idea of being able to make it difficult for the other person to continue the story by providing a challenging story twist.

Students also liked that in some games, such as What’s Moved, players were held to a time constraint for the task. Only get 5 seconds is allotted to look at the position of the objects before one is moved.

Children want to be given some difficulties when posed in fun ways.

Another positive note is that the children found the pieces fun to touch.  They liked that the scissors really open and close and the booklet contained pages and a title.

Suggestions: 

The Directions could be somewhat unclear to the readers.  I want to stress that this perceived lack of clarity only happened with two of the games.  For example in What’s Your Story the instructions tell the players to tell the story Popcorn style but then do not expand on what Popcorn style is. Additionally, in A-Z the instruction state that five or more trinkets are arranged in order depending on a chosen criteria. Chosen Criteria was confusing to many of my students.  Children tend to disagree on unclear terms, so I always suggest that directions are as precise as possible. An adult may not always be around to explain these terms to players. I always stress the importance of clear written instructions to reduce frustration in learning and to prevent any argument among players when trying to learn and play a game.

As a teacher, I like that the suggested activities can be used across grade levels.

What separates Think-ets Teacher Edition from the original pack is that this one comes with an Activity Booklet that is useful to teachers.  In this booklet are numerous examples of Language Arts tasks and Fast Finisher Tasks that illustrate how these trinkets can be tied to the educational setting.  Also, there are several activities that aid ESL children that encourage speaking and and writing, such as listing attributes for one of the objects. Such an activity encourages vocabulary.  There is even a suggestion section for Social Workers and Speech Therapists. I also like that the activities can be used in a short amount of time, yet ignite creativity, thinking, and enthusiasm. I find the story building activity as most useful to my language arts program, as today in the school setting students are writing more than ever.

I highly recommend Think-ets Teacher Edition. Overall, the pack is a useful, positive addition to a classroom and entire educational setting.