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This article is written by Katie Haydon, founder of Ignite Creative Learning Studio. Learn more about Ignite at IgniteCreativeLearning.com or the Ignite Facebook page.

Do you use centers in your primary classroom? If yes, you love them and can’t imagine life without them. If no, you can’t imagine how you could possibly trust your 30 to 35 students to work independently, nor can you figure out where you’d get the time to set them up.

Centers are an excellent tool for differentiation that will free you up to work with small groups of students, whether gifted, high-achievers, or those needing extra help. Simultaneously, centers can support your language arts, science, social studies, and math mandates, proportional to your needs and goals. Done right, your students will be close to angelic, quietly engaged in meaningful and often irresistible work as you work with ability-grouped students on language arts, math, or other subjects. But there are some important tips and tricks that you need to know to make the experience effective for you and your students.

Centers, in my opinion, go beyond mundane and standard worksheet tasks. Sometimes they involve worksheet-type work, but it is work that is intriguing, creative, AND practical all at once. Admittedly, this would take years to develop on your own, but fortunately there are resources out there that have done the heavy lifting for you. Is It Friday Already? by Greta Rasmussen is my favorite learning center resource, and it is the only one you need if you teach second, third, or fourth grades. Of course, you may wish to supplement or tweak the centers provided, but the book has everything you need to get started: an explanation of process, a chart to show how you move your students through the rotation, and enough centers for your entire class for 30 weeks.

Though centers can be used at any time in the year, some teachers like to wait at least a week or two, and sometimes six weeks into the school year to implement them so that they can gain a greater understanding of their students and be confident that they are ready to follow protocol. But if you haven’t started yet, you can certainly begin mid-year with effective benefits to your students.

One issue with large numbers of students in small rooms may be space. If space is a concern for you, purchase a couple of sets of colored plastic trays at Lakeshore, set up the centers on these, and then place them at strategically positioned student desks at center time.

The Rasmussen book is most appropriate for second grade and higher, but if you teach kindergarten or first grade, you might like to explore Mary Peterson’s website, teacher freebie newsletter, and resources. She presented at the California Association for the Gifted conference in Palm Springs last year and shared wonderful, practical ideas for using centers in early primary classrooms. The nature of the centers are different, and she advocates centers that can accommodate multiple children, versus Rasmussen who has created a structure for individual centers (which can be tweaked for larger class sizes). Peterson has a number of pre-made center products, but she also provides a lot of free information if you want to create them yourself.

The bottom line is that centers, with a relatively small upfront investment of time and the purchase of a couple of key resources, will free you up to differentiate in small groups and give students a measure of independence in their learning while exercising creative thinking skills and bolstering standards-based knowledge. Set it up right, and you won’t believe how excited your students will be to follow directions for the privilege of this rich, time-tested approach!

Katie Haydon, founder of Ignite Creative Learning Studio, is a teacher, nationally-known writer and speaker, and a mentor to students of all ages. A life-long learner herself, she loves to find the most creative, innovative, hands-on ways to present math, writing, history, and science to kids. She has taught second grade, Spanish, creative writing, and journalism at Monica Ros, Topa Topa, and Valley Oak Charter schools in Ojai,CA, and creative writing at the Center for Gifted in Chicago. Katie is a published author on teaching, parenting, and early foreign language instruction, and her work was recently featured in Igniting Creativity in Gifted Learners, K-6, edited by Joan Franklin Smutny. A graduate of Northwestern University, Katie majored in Spanish and Latin American language, literature, and culture, and minored in economics. She serves on the Torrance Legacy Creative Writing Awards committee for the National Association for Gifted Children.

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Here are seven interesting resources to use in your classroom. I originally shared these on Twitter. You can follow me there @ByrdseedGifted

1. Six word stories Intriguing writing exercise?
2. Children’s drawings transformed into realistic art! Could older students bring in their childhood art and update it?
3. Amazing resource for the history of food.
4. Using this site for Egyptian self-portraits. Interesting rules to create authentic-looking art.
5. Rhein II – the most expensive photograph ever sold
6. What Gifted Adults Say About Their Childhoods
7. It may turn out that proven classroom management techniques undermine the realization of more ambitious goals…” from an article by Alfie Kohn

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Related: Another Seven Resources from Twitter Seven resources from around the web. From beautiful volcanos, winter...

Not the first Steve Jobs quote on the site, but certainly an intriguing one when thinking about our classrooms:

“I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.” (via Wired)

Thoughts? Do kids have enough time to think and how can we structure downtime into our day to promote curiosity?

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Related: NAGC: Scientists Love Curiosity My first post from NAGC 2010. A high-caliber panel of...

Advanced learners and chess go hand in hand. In the past, I’ve used chess to introduce systems, introduce depth and complexity, and discuss paradoxes. However, since so many of my students understand the basics of chess, I decided to expose them to some chess-like games from other cultures.

Go

We began our study with Go, a game originating from China but often associated with Japan. Go is played on a grid of 19 by 19 intersecting lines, although smaller boards are also used.

Go is a great starting point because of its simplicity. There is only one type of piece, and players simply attempt to surround their opponent. When surrounded, groups of pieces are removed from the board. The winner is the player who controls the majority of the board.

Within minutes of my introduction, my students were giving it a shot and no one showed any signs of stopping after a half hour.

Everyone simply used whiteboards, drawing 5×5 boards to start with. After some practice, I gave them graph paper and they created 9×9 and 13×13 boards.

Naturally, this simple game contains incredible depth and could become a year long study for students who take an interest.

There are some beautiful Go sets available, but I’ve gone with this cheap magnetic set for students to use in the classroom.

Xiangqi

While researching Go, I came across the Chinese board game Xiangqi. This chess-like game features numerous pieces, such as:

• generals
• advisors
• elephants
• soldiers
• horses
• cannon
• chariots

Some interesting points of divergence from chess include:

• a river which divides the board and controls movement
• a palace which restrict movements of essential pieces
• pieces which are placed on intersections, rather than within boxes

I haven’t used Xiangqi in the classroom yet, as it’ll require an actual set of pieces. A quick stop at Amazon revealed a couple inexpensive options: a magnetic travel set and a basic set, both for around $10.

Shatranj

As we were reading about Go, a student alerted me to the Indian game Shatranj, considered the ancestor to modern chess.

This game developed out of an even older variant, called Chanturanga. It may fascinate your students to learn that no one knows how some of the Chaturanga pieces moved. This knowledge has been lost.

Shatranj’s pieces parallel modern chess, but also have interesting differences:

• The Shah is analogous to the king
• The Fers, or counsellor, is a bishop that can move only one square diagonally
• The chariot parallels the rook
• The elephant is like a bishop, but moves two squares diagonally and jumps like a knight
• The horse (or Faras) is identical to the knight
• The foot-soldiers (Baidaqs) are nearly the same as pawns

It appears that Shatranj can be played with a standard chess set by renaming a few pieces, so no need to purchase anything to get started!

Fairy Chess

Once I started reading about these different pieces, I start wanting to create my own version of chess. This is a popular way of playing chess and is known as Fairy Chess. Variants include new rules, different board sizes, and (my favorite) new pieces.

Some popular fairy chess pieces are:

• the Amazon (a combination of knight and queen)
• the Nightrider (a knight which can make multiple knight-like leaps per turn)
• the Grasshopper (a queen which leaps over existing pieces)

A fun variant on chess is to include four players, one on each side of the playing field This requires a slightly modified board, but radically changes players’ strategies.

More examples of fairy chess can be found here.

Kriegspiel

A final example is a fascinating German twist on chess, called Kriegspiel in which players are unaware of the positions of their opponent’s pieces. This more accurately simulates a real war and requires a third player who acts as a referee, determining whether moves are legal. A similar variant, Dark Chess, allows partial information about opponent’s pieces based on what the player’s current pieces can “see.”

These variations add immense complexity, but would probably work best using a computer to provide feedback on legal moves and consequences.

When To Use?

These aren’t going to be in-depth studies, but I might grab twenty minutes of class time every couple weeks and introduce one of these games. I’d allow students to play after they’ve finished other work, or offer boards during recess or before school as a way to get like-minded students interacting.

Some students will go deep on their own, quickly outclassing me, while others may not be too interested. This is simply a way to expose my students to new ideas and shake up their points of view.

Let me know if you incorporate this into your classroom!

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In her study on the “The Eight Great Gripes ” of gifted students, Judy Galbraith identified boredom with school as gripe number two.

The stuff we do in school is too easy and it’s boring.

This complaint is completely understandable. How many meetings have you sat through, going over material you had already mastered? Have you ever understood something quickly, but had to trudge through 45 more minutes of examples and explanations?

For our gifted students, their school career is a long stretch of those meetings. Many of them remember the topic you’re teaching from pervious years, learned about it outside of school, or simply understood your lesson right away.

We’ve got to move them onto something else.

The only way to find these students is to pre–assess. Here are six traits of a quality pre-assessment:

1. Focused

Pick a reasonable sized topic to pre–assess. An entire unit is too large. You won’t find many students who can demonstrate mastery of such a large topic. However, a single day’s lesson is too small and will bury you in paperwork as you try to pre–assess on a daily basis.

Find a chunk of material that would take a week or two to cover. This will give you a chance to spread out testing as well as develop a decent–sized activity for those students who do demonstrate mastery. Plus, this chunk is small enough that several students can be expected to pass the pre–assessment. We don’t want to discourage students by constantly announcing that no one passed.

As an example, for my 6th graders, a pre–test covering all decimal operations would be too large. This is an entire unit. The topic of “Adding Single-Digit Decimals” might be too small, since it’s a one–day lesson and was covered in previous grades. However, I might give a pre–assessment covering all cases of “Adding and Subtracting Decimals.” This is a “chapter sized” chunk and might take two weeks to go through following the textbook.

Naturally, this would look very different depending on your grade–level and curriculum.

2. Quick!

By keeping your pre–assessment focused, you can make the testing procedure nice and quick – for you and your students. Students needn’t take a forty question unit test to show they can add decimals.

Can they demonstrate mastery of with five questions? Ten questions?

By keeping it quick, you also alleviate the burden of grading and recording this paperwork.

Finally, this lowers students’ frustration level. A giant test is intimidating and discourages effort. A quick, focused assessment encourages students to do their best, even if they can’t always pass.

3. Comprehensive

On the other hand, make sure that your quick assessment adequately covers all aspects of your curriculum.

For example, to pre–assess addition and subtraction of decimals, I want to test the edge cases, not the low hanging fruit. Think of the errors that separate expert understanding from basic understanding, and test those.

Decimal Operations

If a student can answer these questions correctly, I know they have mastered these decimal operations at a 6th grade level:

1. 0.3 + 0.8 = ____
2. 1.7 + 0.45 = ____
3. 5.731 + 1.29 = ____
4. 3.0 – 1.25 = ____
5. 0.05 – 0.005 = ____

Notice that I don’t waste any of my questions testing “0.1 + 0.1″. I get straight to the meat that really demonstrates mastery.

In this case, I might also add a couple problem solving questions as well, to make sure students can apply their understanding of decimals.

Punctuating Quotations

If I’m pre–assessing “punctuating quotations,” here are five examples to punctuate that will separate the experts from the beginners:

1. I like candy said Joe
2. I said Joe like candy
3. Do you like candy asked Joe
4. Joe asked do you like candy
5. Do you Joe asked like candy

A final note on being comprehensive: beware multiple–choice questions. It’s too easy for gifted students to “figure out” the right answer when it’s right in front of them. And you don’t want students guessing their way through your pre–assessment, either. Plus, you learn a lot about your students’ understanding by seeing their work without any scaffolds.

4. Built On Existing Materials

I bet your curriculum came with all sorts of quizzes, extra–problems, test–prep, etc that you rarely make use of. Dust off those ancillary materials and mine them for good questions. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

5. Guiding

Your pre–assessment should do more than separate the class into two groups: mastery and non–mastery. It should also inform your lessons.

Maybe only three students successfully passed the pre-assessment. But did everyone get questions one and two right? This should change the way you teach that material. Move quicker, skip it, do a more creative activity, etc.

Likewise, did you notice some students miss those “easy” questions? Perhaps that will alert you to students in need of some extra help during instruction.

6. Sensitive

Your gifted kids like to score 100%. However, most students will not even pass a pre–assessment, especially when covering new or difficult material.

Prep your students for this. Explain why you offer the pre-assessment. Explain that a poor grade never enters the grade book. Only post or announce names of students who pass the pre–assessment, never those who don’t.

Also, do not demand perfection. A student who achieves 90% shouldn’t be forced to sit through all of your lessons. If a student misses one question, I’d include them on that specific lesson or give them a quick explanation when I show them their test.

Where To Go From Here?

Once you’ve developed a quality pre–assessment, you should spend time analyzing the results. Look for patterns. Adjust your plans.

For those who “tested–out,” you’ll need to develop a high–level, alternative assignment to utilize their mastery. Or perhaps you have an ongoing project that they can spend time on. We’ll discuss these options in a later article.

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There’s something about LEGO that transcends time. I see my students playing with virtually the same bricks that I used as a child. And now, thanks to the internet, we can see the potential of these simple building materials.

The list begins with projects with the most obvious classroom applications and ends with some impressive projects that maybe the more creative amongst you can apply to your class.

• Historical Recreation Recreate essential events from your social studies curriculum using LEGO, like this moment in Julius Caesar’s life.

• Reverse Engineering Lego Fantastic puzzle for inductive thinking: figure out how to build an object with no instructions.

• Visual with poem A poem (actually a song) paired with a builder’s Lego creation.

• Accurate Movie Recreations Here’s a series of movie scenes accurately reproduced in LEGO. Your students could do the same for the most dramatic moment of a story.

• Artistic Movie Recreations Similar to the last, here is a group of more artistic reinterpretations of movie scenes. Ask your students to reinterpret moments from stories.

• Famous Photo Recreations Another set of recreations, this time of famous photos, such as the famous 1932 photograph “Lunch atop a skyscraper”.

• MC Escher in LEGO A series of MC Escher creations brought accurately into the third dimension using LEGO – pretty impressive considering these structures are technically impossible!

• LEGO Stopmotion A stop–motion movie made entirely from LEGO and funded through support via the internet. Check out “Robots!“.

• Minimalism In Advertisements Some beautiful examples of minimalism in Lego Advertisements. Click through to see all four. Possible use: “How few blocks can you use to deliver the big idea of an object?”

• Remote Controlled, Motorized Sandcrawler What perseverance! A Star Wars–inspired, nine month project. Includes remote-controlled steering, motorized crane, and a working conveyor belt.

Photo by kennymatic.

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In a previous article, I discussed giving gifted students an actual reason to show their work beyond the nebulous claim that “someday you’ll need to show work because the problems will be so long!”

Steps Help Communication

Many wrote in to add that showing work is important as a way of communicating and offering proof to an audience. But, whether we realize it or not, the only audience many students are performing for is a test scanner.

So, teachers, let’s put our money where our mouths are and give them a chance to experience that showing steps is vital to communication. And give them this chance daily!

Use Homework

As soon as math starts, table groups whip their homework problems out and compare answers. I walk around and check to see that the work (which is typically eight to ten problems) was completed and listen for patterns in their discussion.

Some Common Statements

• “Wait! How’d you get that?”
• “Oh, I see what I did.”
• “Let’s see why we’re different.”

For the most part, students confirm that they got the same answer. Often, someone will have something different, and this lets the group compare work to see where the difference came from.

But inevitably, someone has a different answer but has shown no steps. This leads to a teacher’s paradise, in which students get annoyed at each other for not showing steps (Yes! Math peer pressure!), which leads to the student reworking the problem to prove his solution to his peers.

Then, if you’re really lucky, that student was right the whole time and now has helped his group understand the problem. Or else, the rest of the group gets to point out how skipping the steps caused him to make a mistake.

Either way, everyone is experiencing the importance of showing work as a tool for communication, and you don’t have to be a nag.

Increase The Drama

Now it helps that I have a pretty motivated group of kids who, for the most part, really care about getting this stuff right.

If motivation is a problem, I’ve had students present homework problems to the class (steps required!) after this discussion time, earning some token for their group. This ramps up the drama a bit, since everyone has a chance of representing the group.

I use raffle tickets as a prize. When a presenter makes an error or skips a step, I stop him, give him a chance to catch the error, but, if he doesn’t see it, I call another group up and double the potential prize! This leads to some serious excitement.

Now, you have to know your kids and be prepared to work around those who have math anxiety. This should be a time to reward success, not continuously punish those who are known to be struggling. Be strategic in calling up certain students. Give them a chance to shine when you know they’ve got it.

Improving Interactions

Another problem might be group interactions, so you’ve gotta get that seating chart just right. Don’t put the bossy brainiac next to the shy, struggling math student. Instead, use those caring, nurturing students to provide a safer environment for a student in need. I’ve seen this make a world of difference for some students.

If you’ve got a super genius who is doing this math in their sleep and messing the group interactions up, goodness gracious test them out and give them something interesting to do!

Also, if kids are having trouble “discussing” and not “arguing,” create a scaffold of appropriate ways to communicate:

This time is an amazing informal assessment on kids’ progress, since you’re free to walk the room and check in on who is floundering and who is nailing it.

If you absolutely need a written assessment, you can give a quickie quiz and collect it after these discussions.

More Hints

• Limit time. This should take three to five minutes.
• This means math homework is short (but you already know not to give gifted kids repetitive practice, right?).
• Intervene quickly when you hear inappropriate interactions.
• Take notes on examples of great discussion and share them out.
• In the end, work any problems that caused mass confusion.

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Love this quote:

“When a male nurse came to the class, a student asked why he didn’t become a doctor,” Klemm says. Students then discussed the legitimacy of gender biases.

Fantastic example of how students can take an idea in an unexpected direction, especially when teachers are open to it.

Some of my colleagues have created career projects, but I’ve never heard of this:

After months of research, students wrote realistic fiction stories about their careers

I love the integration of fiction. What a powerful way to motivate narrative writing!

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This quote stood out as a compact answer to those who wonder how a gifted program is different:

In a typical classroom, students might study a few fairy tales, including “Jack and the Beanstalk.” They’d talk about stories and characters and that would be the end of it. “In a GATE class, we’ll look at constant themes like good and evil,” Brooks said. “But then we’d go deeper and talk about ethics: was Jack a thief?”

A gifted program doesn’t mean more homework, harder grading, or skipping a year of curriculum. It does mean that students are exploring material in different ways and in greater depth than their peers.

Now I’m off to incorporate that intriguing Jack And The Beanstalk question into a lesson…

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As a teacher, it’s easy to give fill-in-the-blank assignments. They’re simple to grade, provide practice for end-of-year assessments, and are often provided by textbook writers.

Yet this sends a message of “you must follow the directions” to a room of students who are creative, flexible, divergent thinkers. These are the future Noble Laureates, inventors, and revolutionaries. I’m not sure this is the message they should hear.

Instead, let’s set up questions that allow them (or better yet: force them) to exercise their creative muscles.

There’s No Easy Way

You can’t assign creative work and then run it through the scantron machine. This stuff requires reading every answer and grading by hand. And yes, no state test will assess this type of thinking. But our students, especially our gifted kids, aren’t going to become leaders because of their ability to memorize and bubble in the right responses, but because of their innovative and well-thought-out ideas.

As Seen Around The Web

Before tossing out some upper-elementary/middle school ideas, I’m going to send you over to notjustchildsplay.blogspot.com for some awe-inspiring work done by first graders:

• What Civil Rights Should a Snowman Have?
• Writing From The Perspective of Inanimate Objects
• A Tribute To Langston Hughes

Creative Questioning On Tests

I always include two short-response questions on my weekly language arts tests. Yes, this means a bunch of weekly-grading that could be avoided with multiple-choice questions, but then I couldn’t have fun asking questions like:

• How would [Character from story A] behave in [Character from story B]‘s situation?
• What if [Character A]‘s adventures took place in [some new setting]? How would he would behave?
• Who would make a better friend, [Character A] or [Character B]?
• Who would you rather have with you in an emergency, [Character A] or [Character B]?

Note that you should set these up with characters who could both be good friends or both be good in emergencies, so students really have to think and justify their responses.

Create Symbols

As we worked on the 3D Analysis project, my final task was for students to develop a symbol to represent each of their eight characters. These symbols had to clearly show the characters’ morality level, intelligence style, and scholarly habit, yet they could not be literal drawings of the characters.

Talk about a challenge. I had trouble even cooking up a solid example. As a class, we ended up designing an ethics icon with vines wrapping around it to demonstrate a character with perseverance, who demonstrates naturalistic intelligence, but makes questionable moral decisions.

Make Them Argue Both Sides

We just finished reading about the paradox of China’s Great Wall (it caused the end of the Ming Dynasty even though they built it for protection). Students imagined they jumped back in time and had to convince the Ming Dynasty to halt construction of the wall. They wrote this as a paragraph anchored with the generalization “causes lead to unexpected effects.”

Then, I told students that (oops!) their advice still led to the downfall of the Ming Dynasty. The emperor decided to stop building the wall, yet his dynasty still collapsed. Students had to write an apology paragraph to the Ming rulers explaining how choosing not to build the wall also lead to their downfall, reinforcing the idea of unexpected effects.

This really twisted some of their minds, and I got some amazing results.

Two Types Of Students

These tasks will reveal two sides of the gifted mind. Some students will take to these open-ended questions like a fish to water. Another set will ask endless clarifying questions and generally be reluctant to jump in.

These seemingly contradictory mindsets are both typical characteristics of gifted learners. Gifted students can work very well on open-ended tasks, yet there can also be a fear to take risks, especially as they get older.

Be aware of this fear and encourage students by providing an environment that acknowledges the possibility, and necessity, of failure.

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