Our gifted students can do grade-level work with little instruction, but how do we demand excellence?
Year: 2010
To Show Or Not To Show Work In Math
We must be careful not to admonish our intuitive learners for being intuitive. As teachers of the gifted, we must set up learning environments that are best for our students. And if they’re doing it all in their heads (and getting it right!), then the environment needs to change.
Differentiating Comprehension Skills: Noting Details
By 6th grade, our reading program’s comprehension skills have become a bit basic for most of my gifted students. I’ve been working on increasing the depth and complexity of these skills. In this case, “Noting Details” has become “Explicit Vs. Implicit Details.”
10 Ways To Differentiate Tomorrow
Ten simple ways to alter your classroom for the benefit of gifted learners.
111 Greek and Latin Word Parts
To differentiate spelling and vocabulary for my gifted students, I incorporate words with Greek and Latin origins. This list is a compilation of 111 Greek and Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes, along with 35 groups of 5 related English words, plus 5 task cards.
Mega Homophone List
Challenge your gifted students and advanced spellers with this list of 320 homophones arranged into groups of ten. Also includes five task cards for independent work with homophones.
Curiosity Fridays – Part IV
We decided to promote creativity and curiosity through student-led research and experimentation. Students developed guiding questions and created hypotheses. They are now ready to dig into resources, find answers, ask new questions, and report what they’ve learned. As the teacher, what are your responsibilities?
Curiosity Fridays – Part III
It’s time to address students who want to experiment on Curiosity Fridays. We need to help them develop a scientific question and hypothesis. We’ll use SCAMPER to create interesting questions and depth and complexity to track data.
Curiosity Fridays – Part II
Since we’re just introducing Curiosity Fridays, we’re all going to investigate chess. Now, chess is an enormous topic that people devote entire lives to. We’ll need to refine the topic. Enter Google’s Wonder Wheel
Curiosity Fridays – Part I
Merlin Mann stated that employees’ motivation increases when they get to “build a robot” once in a while. That is, do something creative beyond regular work. Can we do this at school? Offices have “casual Fridays,” can we have “curiosity Fridays?”