I co-teach a pull-out program for Gifted students in our district. We only meet seven times per year, and we're not bound by provincial curriculum, so planning our sessions is almost as much fun as teaching them! Each year we have a theme, and this year's was "That's Entertainment". The session we're doing right now is a lead up to our final session, in which the students will film and edit their own silent movies.

As an opening activity in the session we're teaching right now, we wanted the students to start thinking about costuming. I found a fairly straight forward idea; each student gets four paper grocery bags, markers, masking tape, and scissors. They have to use these materials to create a costume. That's it. Not a bad little activity on it's own - it's open ended, creative, fun, and gets them thinking. But we wanted to up the ante a little bit and make it more cooperative as well as a bit more meaningful.

After the students were finished their costumes (we gave them about 30-40 minutes), we gave the second part of the instructions. As a class, they needed to divide themselves into groups to put on a fashion show. The group could be any size, but we did not allow "groups of one". Each group presented one fashion line in the show, and each line had to be on a theme. If a student was left out, it was up to the other students in the class to figure out how they could fit his or her costume into a theme.

The kids were fantastic. While some of the themes were obvious (we had three superheroes), there was a lot of creative thinking needed to make sure everyone in the class was part of a line. In some cases, students created a new story for their costume. In others, the themes were changed to involve more students.

And in one case, the theme was "Two Robots and a Duck", but it was stated with such confidence that we let it stand.

I liked this activity because it encouraged students to work with those they normally wouldn't (a big issue, since our program has students from grades 5-8), but it also forced them to change their thinking partway through a task - and that's a difficult thing for even adults to accept!

I think it would be fun to try this again but after having the students do their first fashion show have them sort themselves into all new groups using different lines.