A Look At Gifted from Another Perspective

Mrs. Scott is a 1st grade teacher at Erma Siegel.  She attended the NAGC with the group from MCS in November.  A few days ago (last Wednesday), she sent me an email with a document attached called, ” What I would want every parent, teacher, and administrator to know about gifted children.”  I immediately replied to ask her if she’d give me permission to post this on the blog.  It’s taken a few days for me to get it on here (sorry JS), but it’s definitely something to share.  Thanks Mrs. Scott for sharing what was on your heart with me and being willing to send it to the world.  Keep up the remarkable work you do each and every day.  To everyone else, need ideas?  Mrs. Scott is a great resource!!

Notes from Mrs. Scott

 

Yo, Yo Listen Up ‘Cuz I Can’t Rap

But Flocabulary can!!  While I was at John Pittard last week, Mrs. Stone shared two websites she has been using in her class.  Check them out!  & THANK YOU Mrs. Stone.

Sample from Flocabulary

http://learnzillion.com

DBQ (plus curriculum compacting)

Bet you don’t know what THAT means.  Neither did I.  I was doing some digging online, looking for resources to help teachers learn more about Curriculum Compacting because the 5th grade teachers at Cason Lane and I are planning to get together this week to collaborate.  I ran into this website, and I really liked what she had to say about curriculum compacting.  So I decided to continue to explore her webpage.

Then I saw the DBQ.  I scrolled through the document because I had never heard of it.  It stands for Document Based Question.  Okay.  The concept isn’t new.  Got it.  But listen to this!!  The assignment was about comparing and contrasting.  The students were given a brief description of an event at the mall.  Several “witnesses” had comments.  The students had to compare and contrast all the statements to decide what REALLY happened at the mall and write a thesis.  How cool is that!!

DBQ_Mall

Since I also mentioned compacting…here’s some good information about it and Carolyn Coil’s website.

Curriculum Compacting

CCSS Units with TEXT Suggestions!!!

The other day, Sheri Arnette told me about a website.  I happened upon it this morning and was amazed at the possibilities it offered.  I haven’t had an opportunity to dig deeply, but from my surface skim, this could give you a plethora of ideas!!  I like how it gives suggested texts, but I LOVE how it breaks the modules into a scaffold approach.

The way I stumbled onto it was through a resource page from another county in the state.  It had some items worth exploring.

Sullivan County

EngageNY is the website Sheri shared with me.  It is found here.

Enjoy!

 

Adventures Beyond the Classroom Walls

How would your students like to sit beside the Amazon River and learn about the layers of the rainforest?  Integrating content helps engage and motivate!  Connections are made that are natural and relevance seems to peek out of every corner.  Learning sticks when it’s enjoyable.  It’s inviting.

Recently at Scales, the third grade team took on a project that their students will never forget.  Explaining it would sell it short.  I’ll let the video tell you the rest of the story.

Step outside of the box.  You might find YOU like it just as much as the kids do.

Simple Machine Valentine Box

What a fantastic day I had at Cason Lane this week!!  I am always amazed at the talent lurking in our schools.  I get so excited when teachers combine hands-on learning with layers of thinking, with a little choice on top!!  Instant motivation and engagement.

Ms. Jackson is having her 4th graders design Valentines boxes that include 6 simple machines.

Now, THAT’s making use of every opportunity to learn!!

Which Comes First?

Learning or thinking?

While doing some prep work for tomorrow’s appointments, I began searching good ole Google.  (How did I survive all those years?  I LOVE having answers at my fingertips.)  I had questions and wanted to see what the world had to answer them.

Then, I found her (actually she is using HIS work).  An article that defines “reflection.”  It’s long.  It’s scholarly.  So I’ll differentiate.  I’ll pull out some phrases that are AWESOME, and I’ll provide the link.  You can choose your route. (Isn’t choice nice?  How often do you give your students a choice?)  Hopefully these pieces will spark your interest enough to dig into the article called, “Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking” by Carol Rodgers.  Here are some highlights:

• My purpose is, quite simply, to provide a clear picture of Dewey’s original ideas so that they might serve as we improvise, revise, and create new ways of deriving meaning from experiences-thinking to learn.
• “What (an individual) has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow.  The process goes on as long as life and learning continue.”
• …other kinds of thinking is stream of consciousness. It is the thinking all of us are involuntarily awash in all the time….This is often the only kind of thinking teachers have time for.
• …moves the learner from a disturbing state of perplexity…to a harmonious state of settledness.  Perplexity is created when an individual encounters a situation whose “full character is not yet determined.”  That is, the meaning of the experience has not yet been fully established.
• An additional source of motivation is curiosity, without which there is little energy for the hard work of reflection.
• The store of one’s wisdom is the result of the extent of one’s reflection.
• Formulating the problem or question itself is half the work.  As Dewey says, “A question well put is half answered.”
• Reflection must include action.
• Dewey knew that merely to think without ever having to express what one thought is an incomplete act….The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated.
• Curiosity about and enthusiasm for that subject matter is essential to good teaching.  Without them a teacher has no energy, no fuel, to carry out reflective inquiry-much less teaching itself.

There is great information in this article.  It helps to define true reflection, its purpose, and the importance of disciplined reflection.  Eye opening.  I hope you’ll take the time to read the article for yourself.

Rodgers, C. (2002). Defining Reflection Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking. Teachers College Record, 104(4), 842-866.

Fabulous Finds

I love it when highly respected individuals share ideas!  It’s kind of like peeking into their brains and seeing how they think or what gets their attention.  It tells us more about them…which explains why they are held in high esteem.

1)  Dr. Garrett (Grizzard) shared a fabulous find today.  She saw these in the  IRA’s Reading Today this month.  It’s a new twist to literature circle roles.  What a match with CCSS!

a fact finder (finds important facts)

a solution suggester (provides alternative solutions)

a passage picker (identifies the emotions of a character within a passage)

a travel tracer (explains how the character’s emotions are represented in a setting)

an investigator (finds interesting words and researches their meaning)

a director (creates questions at four levels for students in the group to respond to)

a journaler (describes why a scene is important)

THANKS for sharing!!  What a useful tool!!

2)  While breaking down a writing standard today, it got a little tricky.  The verb (state) was DOK 1; however, they had to state an opinion.  Uh oh…that’s not DOK 1.

Dr. Brooks whips out her phone and goes straight to the Hess’s Cognitive Rigor Matrix.  This neat tool helps you decipher tricky situations when you are trying to decide the level of rigor.

matrix

What a GREAT day!  Thanks Dr. Brooks for sharing.

Book Study (previously mentioned)

If you are interested in following the book study I’ll probably be having with myself (ha ha ha), I’ll be posting comments on the following entry previously blogged.

Book Study: Square Peg: My Story and What it Means for Raising Innovators, Visionaries, and Out-of-the-Box Thinkers

My Mom’s Drawing Book

My mom, Kaylea Mangrum, has self-published 4 books.  She designed a drawing instruction process, called Frog Hops, and applied it to these step-by-step drawing books.  Currently, you can download one of them for free as an iBook in iTunes.  This past year, her book was one of the top downloaded books in the category for the year. Cool!!

WHY do I think this is appropriate for this blog?  When I taught kindergarten, we would use these step-by-step instructions to draw a picture and write about it.  It also helped with visual discrimination when they used the instructions independently in workstations.

Here is a sample page of the free download.  This particular book has more difficult tasks.  Try this book, for free, on the iPad.  Go to iTunes and search for Kaylea Mangrum in iBooks.  The title of the free download is How to Draw Step-by-Step with Special Kids.  (She has done work with the Special Kids Organization in town.  Her time with them inspired her to produce this work.)

Sure I’m proud of my mom.  But I am also a sucker for free things…especially when it can help in my classroom!  Push creativity by asking them to complete the picture with questions such as, “What’s the weather?  I can’t tell by your picture.”

ENJOY!