The teacher read It’s OK To Be Different, by Todd Parr, with the class, and the children were asked to make personal connections with the story. Afterward, they talked about the similarities and differences between them and their classmates. They then created self-portraits.

We’re Different, We’re The Same, from Sesame Street and My Nose, Your Nose, by Melanie Walsh were also used as extension books.

Students in an English class were given the following assignment:

At the end of a poetry unit, students were asked to write and perform a spoken word poem. It could be on any topic. Afterwards, they were asked to reflect on their creative process.

This student chose ‘loyalty’ as a topic for his poem because he thinks it is an important virtue. He then made deliberate creative choices that he felt enhanced the ideas.

Students in an English Language Arts class had been reading, writing and discussing the concept of happiness. Their final task was to write a poem to describe happiness. 

After struggling to write down their thoughts, these two students asked their teacher if they could perform a dance instead of writing a poem to express their ideas about happiness. The teacher agreed.

Students in an English class were asked to write group essays on a poem of their choice and then to reflect on their creative thinking.

This student made a model of a house for a Science Fair project and applied his knowledge of circuitry from Science to put in lighting.

Once he had lighting, he wished he had plumbing too but could not immediately see a way to do that. However, one day he had an “Aha!” moment about how to get running water in his house:

“One day I was drinking from a juice box and I squeezed too hard and the juice went everywhere.  I thought I could use that idea for the water in my house.” 

In this classroom, an hour a week is set aside as “Genius Hour”, a time when students can pursue their own interests by working on projects of their own choosing.

The teacher found that initially the students did quite safe, school-like projects but he decided to “trust the process” and persevere. Some students are now in their second year with this teacher and have started to find interests and passions to pursue.

A class was planning a secret Santa exchange. This student, who is the class’s “social coordinator”, decided they should make a vending machine for presents with an elf inside who would deliver the presents down a slide. She got the idea last year and did something along those lines, but she wanted to refine her idea. She engaged about a quarter of the students in the class in this project and they worked on it at lunchtime.

After reading the story, Not A Stick by Antoinette Portis, students asked to turn a stick into something new and innovative. All of the students were able to complete the task and create something using the stick and most of their work would illustrate Profile 2.

However, this student made the task fit his existing passion for invention and his current creative project.

This student had drawn a detailed picture of a mine that he wanted to share with the class. He knows a lot about mines – he plays Minecraft and his dad works in the mining industry internationally. He is aware of his creativity (“I have a creative mind”) and clearly values it. But where his ideas come from is a mystery to him. He says it’s a “secret” but knows that’s not quite the right analogy: