I’ve heard the benefits of cultivating divergent thinking, and I couldn’t agree more. The industrial model of school is very linear, anti-social, and lacks the dynamics that different kinds of thinkers require. Open-ended materials like legos were my favorite toys as a kid, and little did I know, I was exercising my divergent thinking muscles. At our school, we engage the kids with all kinds of incremental, open-ended blocks and other components. Interacting with manipulatives, as we call them in ABA therapy, doesn’t usually feel like work to the kids, so you can even use them as motivators to do other work!