🧠 What is Reflective Thinking?

Reflective thinking is the process of reflecting on experiences and new learnings and creating connections between them. These Reflective Thinking Sentence Starter Cards are a great tool to help students initiate their own discussions about the new things they have learned. Addressing all levels of writing, this pack includes cards for describing what was learned and how it can be put into practice, reasons why ideas might have worked out or not worked out well, problems encountered during the learning process, future goals, or other thoughts related to the topic at hand.

These sentence starters are a great tool to have when working on the open-ended reflective thinking skill with your students.

Some of the sentence starters included in this resource are:

• I predict that…
• Today I discovered…
• What surprised me today was…
• Today’s lesson made me feel __ because…
• For me, the most important fact was…
• I’m still confused about…
• Now I wonder…

Ways to Use These Task Cards in the Classroom

📝 Whole-Class Lesson Closer

At the end of a lesson or activity, pull a reflective thinking sentence stem out of the stack and read it to your students. Set the timer for 5 minutes and have your students complete the thought and expound on it. Have a few students share when they are done.

🎟️ Individual Exit Tickets

Give each student in your class a reflective thinking sentence stem card and a sticky note or notecard at the end of class. Have students complete the sentence and briefly explain it on their sticky note or notecard and then turn it in as they leave class.

👩‍👧‍👦 Small-Group Closer

After a lesson with your small group, pull out 3 reflective thinking sentence stem cards and lay them out on the table for the students to read. Allow each student to choose which sentence stem they would like to complete on a small dry-erase board. Have each student share out before leaving the table.

🖨️ Easily Prepare This Resource for Your Students

Use the dropdown arrow on the Download button to choose the PDF or editable Google Slides version of this resource.

Check out these individual resources to save you time on lesson planning: