Use List Making in the Classroom to Develop Critical Thinking and Language Skills

As a teacher, you know how important it is that your students develop critical thinking and language skills, but you may not always know how to build these skills in a fun and engaging way. List making combines both skill sets and can be a lot of fun for students.

What is List Making?
List making consists or providing your class with a topic and allowing them to make a list of items or concepts that fit the topic. For example, you may provide the class with the topic "things that are cold," "people who wear a suit to work," or even "uses for a ping pong ball." The complexity of the topic depends on your grade level and the skill level of your students.

Set Aside a Time
Set aside a specific time for list making. I used this as an introduction to my language arts block with eighth graders. They would have played it all day, if I had let them-but I limited their time to 2 to 3 minutes at the beginning of class. We then took another 2 minutes to list collective answers so all students had the opportunity to share their responses. I added the extra challenge of allowing them to compete with another language arts class who was provided with the same topic and the same amount of time-but you can easily create two teams within your class if competition fuels your student's fire.

Choosing Topics
Choose topics that match your student's skill level. Beginning with simple topics, such as "things that are blue," "things found in the bathroom" or "kinds of animals" is a good way to introduce the activity and allows for all students to meet success. As the year progresses, add more complex topics. Although I used lists in language arts, it can easily be adapted to other subjects, as well. Consider "names of rivers", "countries in Africa" or "animals of the rainforest" or whatever fits your current curriculum.

Use a Timer
Set a timer with a beeper. When the beeper sounds, all students must drop their pens and get ready to share their lists.

Share Responses
Select a student to record the responses of their classmates on the white board. Go around the room allowing students to share their responses. If you are limited on time, allow the first student to share all his responses and the second student to share only responses that differ from the first. Repeat the procedure until all the responses are exhausted.

Keep a record of the number of responses and watch them grow as students practice this skill throughout the year.

List making can be incorporated into your regular schedule, used to give students a break during the day or whenever you have a few minutes of extra time-but once you start, be prepared to continue this activity, as many kids enjoy the challenge of outwitting their classmates and work hard to come up with unique responses.