Think you’re lucky to get your students to read a story once? Can’t imagine convincing a class to read a story through again? The key is giving your gifted students an enticing purpose for a reread.
Year: 2009
Meeting Advanced Learners’ Needs in Language Arts
To start differentiating in Language Arts, it’s often as simple as upgrading your examples. Bring in authentically interesting novels, paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and words.
Concept Attainment: A Model for Inductive Thinking
The first grammar lesson in our reading program is titled “types of sentences.” Nothing excites gifted 11 year olds less than watching me explain the difference between interrogative and declarative sentences. This year, rather than teach the lesson using direct instruction, I used another model of instruction: concept attainment.
Books for Teaching Thinking
We teach our gifted students to solve math problems, write fantastic essays, and read above grade level, but do we teach them to think? Edward Debono believes that thinking should be taught as a discrete subject. As I start the new school year, I’ve found a few books to help me embed quick “thinking lessons” into my day. These tools make great options for extension menus or creative differentiated products.
Actually Interesting Vocabulary Studies
I know many gifted students slog through the typical vocabulary contract week after week. I know because I put my own students through it. However, gifted students can get more from vocabulary and spelling study than writing the word five times, writing the definition, and then using it in a sentence.
3 Ways Teachers Battle Students’ Giftedness
How easy is it to forget that our gifted learners have truly unique needs? How easy is it to plan lessons straight from our textbooks and use unaltered pedagogy from our credential programs? An amazing article by Dr. Karen Rogers reminded me of three counter-intuitive facts about gifted students’ learning.
Introducing Universal Themes and Generalizations
Generalizations, big ideas, abstractions, universal themes… they are designed to help our gifted students learn. However, what I didn’t realize was that they would help me teach!
Differentiating in Math: Running Multiple Groups in One Class
100%, 100%, 100%. If you’ve ever taught gifted students math, you’re probably familiar with those kids who can knock perfect scores out week after week. You’ve probably also questioned what good you’re doing for those students. A differentiated math program may be just what you need.
The Content Imperatives: Going further with Depth and Complexity
The Content Imperatives are five more prompts that work in conjunction with Depth and Complexity to take your students even deeper into their content.
Movie Previews and Poems’ Tones
In California, both Third and Sixth grade teachers are required to teach students to recognize elements that contribute to the tone of a written piece. I struggled with this abstract concept before landing on an engaging tool to help express the meaning of tone: movie previews.