Wanna know why creating activities for Bloom’s Taxonomy in your lessons will help your students learn better? I will explain! It’s because getting students to practice their lower-order thinking skills as well as their higher-order thinking skills will make their learning of a topic deeper and more complex. It also helps teachers explain to students what they want them to do with newly acquired knowledge in a practical way.
Varying activities and going from simple recall to higher-order thinking skills also helps students see progression in their learning. This motivates and engages them as well as challenges them and pushes them to think critically. And isn’t that what we want in all of our teaching?
Grab a PDF of the sample activities for teaching any grammar point I’m about to show you below by clicking here! Or download my free Great Grammar Lesson Road Map here!
What is the purpose of Bloom’s Taxonomy
The purpose of Bloom’s Taxonomy is to engage students at different levels of cognitive thinking. When students are challenged like this, they retain more of what they learn. This means that teachers should strive to not only teach at only a few of the levels in the Taxonomy, but find activities that ask for the skills in all of the levels. Or at least some in the lower order thinking skills and some in the higher order thinking skills.
The stages of Bloom’s Taxonomy are as follows:
- Remember
- Understand
- Apply
- Analyze
- Evaluate
- Create
How to use Bloom’s Taxonomy in the classroom
So why use Bloom’s Taxonomy for lesson plans? Because if you create your lesson plans with these levels in mind, you can really give some thought to how you can include them all in a strategic way. Below is a picture of action words for Bloom’s Taxonomy that you can use to come up with your exercises.
Some example activities for Bloom’s Taxonomy for each level with regards to grammar and vocabulary study are:
- Remember: complete fill-in-the-blanks sentences with the correct grammatical structure. Memorize a vocabulary list.
- Understand: summarize the rules of a specific grammar point. Translate vocabulary words in the target language to your native language.
- Apply: identify and correct grammatical errors in sample sentences. Demonstrate knowledge of the meaning of vocabulary words by using them in a new sentence.
- Analyze: look at the use of different grammatical structures in a piece of text, and compare how they contribute to the meaning. Connect the new vocabulary words to other words.
- Evaluate: compare and contrast the use of two different grammatical structures and argue which is more effective in specific contexts. Reflect on the use of certain vocabulary and their correctness.
- Create: write a short piece of text using a grammatical structure and explain how it contributes to the meaning of the text. Write a short piece of text using the vocabulary words in a correct and meaningful way.
Give them a try!
These examples of Bloom’s Taxonomy activities can be adjusted for different age and proficiency groups, that’s the beauty of it! Whatever your content is, you can always start at the lower levels and reach the higher levels with your students. This not only helps them learn better, but it also makes their learning more meaningful because it helps them develop it in a deeper way.
I hope these activities for Bloom’s Taxonomy inspired you to lesson-plan in an effective way that will benefit your students. Download a PDF of these sample exercises for reference here!
Related articles:
How to teach a wonderfully complete grammar lesson
Why grammar games can help engage students and solidify their learning
How to introduce grammar topics in a fun and interesting way
