Collaboration
Experiencing Cranium CoRE has many benefits in addition to the four language arts skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) that are engagingly practiced within. One of the primary additional skill sets that a student practices using Cranium CoRE is teamwork.
The format, using the Side Keys, is perfect for teams to be established within the classroom. The ideal number of players on each team for Cranium CoRE is three. Three players can talk quietly and relatively quickly compared to five or seven players on a team. The use of odd numbers works well to avoid a tie when dealing with differences of opinion about which answer is best supported by the text. This is one of the reasons we have a set of ten transmitters in our standard Side Keys package. It means that even if your had 30 students in a class, you would still have enough transmitters for three players on each of the ten teams.
The more the students work together to answer questions in a team format, the better they become at communication, problem solving and conflict resolution. There are not many occasions today in schools where the classroom mirrors a real life scenario in the working world. Playing Cranium CoRE provides this and much more.
The collaboration extends to the teachers as well. Cranium CoRE can be an excellent vehicle for interdisciplinary work using literature, both fiction and non-fiction, as a source for instructional material. You could extend the collaborative effort to the school district as a whole and have schools compete against one another or work together to either play or compose games.
High school speech and debate classes could work with feeder schools all the way down to the elementary level to build a high school specific minor league for speech and debate. Individual high school students or pairs of students could go out periodically to the feeder schools, read aloud to certain classes and play Cranium CoRE with books for which they have composed questions.
This dual purpose effort would include demonstrating an exercise in elocution, reading aloud, as well as demonstrating how to quickly find the supporting evidence in the text to defend an answer.
This is just the beginning of what will be a grand journey for the collaborative benefit of all involved.