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To help children with critical thinking and open-mindedness, it’s important that we teach students to understand things from different points of view and that people may see a similar situation differently.
Here are 4 ways to help you teach awareness of different points of view, which should encourage your students to see the same idea in different ways.
1. ThinkIts
EducationCity’s ThinkIts, which are available in every module on EducationCity, are designed to elicit students’ higher-order thinking skills and challenge students to think on their feet.
They’re great for starting discussion and teaching children to consider their classmates’ points of view and being aware of them. Take a look at this one for example – it’s called “Describing using onomatopoeias” and is available in Lower Key Stage 2 – and is all about exploring how different people hear sounds differently.
2. Picture
Show your students an interesting picture. Divide them up into pairs and get them to discuss what they notice about it. Depending on the image, get individual students to consider questions for a few minutes like what’s going on? Who do you think is in the picture, e.g., how old are they, etc.? Get them to discuss their views together.
Use this activity to show your students whether there is a “wrong” way to see the picture, and that they should be aware that the same thing can look dissimilar depending on who is viewing it. It can be different because we have our own backgrounds and experiences that shape our viewpoints.
3. Discuss Different Characters
Read a short book to your students and discuss the story with them. Ask them to consider a different character from the main character and talk about how the story would be different if that other character was the main character instead. Discuss that character’s point of view and why it might or might not change the story. This is a great way of showing that points of view can be very different too depending on who is looking at a situation.
4. Draw a Scene
Get your students to draw a scene from what happened to them yesterday evening when they got back from school. Then get them to turn the page over. Discuss the scene they drew and how the same one may have been different through another person’s eyes; this could be a parent or a pet. Aim to show that no situation is viewed the same by every individual.