How I would find great ideas for your most advanced primary students, whether they’re in kindergarten, first grade, or second grade.
Year: 2020
How To Get A Kid To Read
No reader has ever said, “I love reading because my parents made me read challenging books” or “Once my teacher made me read at Lexile 980, I discovered how wonderful reading is!”
10 Techniques for Better Questions
Ten techniques I found myself using as I re-wrote old questions from my classroom.
Talk To Your Past Students
Are you ignoring the most cost-effective feedback about your program’s effectiveness? Talk to some past students!
“Priority” is Singular
You can only have one priority. Anything else is a cop-out.
Using Games to Practice Thinking
Here’s how playing simple, paper-and-pencil games can go beyond fun and also serve as practice for higher-level, abstract thinking.
Evaluate with Academic Tournaments
The bracketed tournament isn’t just for college basketball. Set up a tournament to determine best president, state, element, or literary character and challenge your students to make interesting judgements.
How I Take Quarterly Retreats
How (and why) I take a two-day “retreat” every three months.
Rewriting a Sentence With Different Coordinating Conjunctions
The first unit in our writing program was always teaching the coordinating conjunctions. It always felt goofy teaching this to 6th graders – especially a gifted magnet class. I mean… do they really not know the difference between “and” and “but”?
How Clear Is Your Gifted Program’s Purpose?
I’ve long been concerned about how gifted education, as a field, communicates it’s purpose. If we don’t have a clear story, some else will write our story for us and it won’t be pretty.