Our gifted kids receive lots of well-intentioned “you’re so smart” praise. But, this leads directly to a fear of straying beyond their safety zone. In college or the workplace, where they face challenges for the first time, the impostor syndrome rears its terrifying head.
Year: 2013
Tickling Curiosity
Let’s look at a way to encourage and scaffold curiosity in our classes using a “Book of Unanswered Questions.” Begin by sharing intriguing objects or images and asking your own questions. Give kids a chance to find answers to their questions. Then encourage students to bring in their own intriguing conversation starters. Finally, move students towards curriculum based questions.
Puzzle: Words Within Words
In need of some nice word puzzles that will keep your students busy? Ask them to find as many words as they can within another word. For example: can you find 10 words made from the letters in “soldier”? How about 20? 50?
A Book For The Trivia-Obsessed
There’s a type of gifted kid who is simply filled to the brim with “did you know” trivia. If you know a student like this, then have I got a book recommendation for you! “The Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things” explains how objects, customs, and sayings got their start.
Chess Sets Over Time
How did chess sets arrive at their now-standard look? Several recent articles trace the design of the modern chess set.
What Can We Learn From Gifted Adults?
What better way to learn about gifted students’ needs than by talking to gifted adults? Here’s a tour of some of the resources I found online.
Assessing Creativity?
Nothing’s harder than trying to figure out how to honor students’ amazing creativity without coloring their academic grades. My solution: a vote and some special certificates.
Puzzle: Word Ladders
One of my favorite tricks in the classroom was having a “puzzle of the day.” The great difficulty was finding puzzles that challenged my students, but didn’t require meticulous work or strange knowledge. Word Ladders were always a consistent hit.
Goldbach’s Conjecture
Our look at math conjectures continues with Goldbach’s Conjecture, which states that all even integers greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes. Is this true for all cases? Another authentic, unsolved question.
3 More Paradoxes, Part III
Here are even more amazing paradoxes to baffle your students: Buridan’s Bridge, the Bootstrap Paradox, and the Barber Paradox.