TAG Newsletter April 15, 2011
by Bonnie Kramer
May 02, 2011
Getting in GEAR! April 15, 2011
Greetings and I hope everyone's week has gone well! This is the first week of trying out a TAG Parent newsletter, so your feedback is welcome. Although TAG (talented and gifted) is the more common nickname for our high ability learner program, GEAR has a nice ring to it also, standing for Gifted Education At Riverside. I like the mental image of how we are all working together toward a common goal, like gears in a machine, so I thought this might be a good name for our newsletter.
This week in TAG:
Kindergarten--I read Eric Carle's Walter the Baker and we talked about different jobs. We wrote "I Wish I Were..." poems about these jobs. We also practiced turn-taking with Awareness questions from Primarily Creativity, by Leimbach and Vydra. In this book they say that "awareness is the start of all creative thinking. Creativity does not occur in a vacuum. It must build on the knowledge that the learner has already acquired." Our TAG curriculum is built around creative thinking, critical thinking and problem solving, as well as self-efficacy and leadership.
First grade--We worked on a selection from The Greatest Dot-to-Dot Super Challenge! by David Kalvitis. These dot-to-dots in this book are incredible! The ones we worked on had numbers up to around 500-600. Some in the book are two-pagers up to around 1500. These encourage perseverence. In Primarily Creativity, mentioned above, the authors point out that "perseverence is the creative thinking behavior of seeing a task through to its end, or at least to some satisfactory conclusion. It is avoiding the use of the word "can't" and replacing it with a sentence like "I haven't solved this yet, but I will do it!" Often schoolwork is so easy for high ability learners that they rarely ever face a challenge to learn about perseverence and working past their frustration level. This dot-to dot book, along with several other really fun toys and games is available from MindWare.
Second grade--I only see a couple second graders right now, but these kiddos are sharp! We are working out of a book called Primary Grade Challenge Math by Edward Zaccaro available from Hickory Grove Press. This week's chapter was "I Have to Change the Recipe." We worked with fractions, multiplication and division.
Third grade--The entire third grade class took the Cognitive Abilities Test this week. This test gives us valuable information in three areas-verbal, nonverbal and quantitative, which is used as one of the components of our identification process. More information on this test can be found at http://www.criticalthinking.com/company/articles/cogat-test-prep-guide.jsp. This isn't the website we order materials from, but I thought their explanation and examples were helpful. The students from this grade who are pulled out for TAG are working on a readers' theater classroom version of The Tortoise and the Hare. We hope to record using our FlipCam and share with classmates.
Fourth grade is also working on readers' theater presentations. Their scripts are about nutrition, fossils and Civil War. This work will help build confidence in public speaking, and they are coming up with some creative ideas for staging and presentation.
Fifth through eighth grades this week all answered questions about careers, like "would you rather make a lot of money in a job you hate, or less money in a job you love?" and "do you think professional athletes should have salary caps?" After answering questions, they visited the website http://www.mynextmove.org, filling out an interest inventory and exploring various careers.
Although I'm only at the high school basically half a day on Fridays, I can still share some information about various topics of interest to your student. This year we had a student participate in the World Food Prize Youth Institute. Information about next year's event is here: World Food Prize Global Youth Institute. We also had some students at lower levels participate in National History Day. There was only one entry at the high school level from our area. It would be great to get some students involved in this. Next year's theme is "Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History." Information on National History Day can be found on their website. I just noticed that National History Day has a fan page on Facebook, which leads into my next topic.
If you are "on Facebook", besides National History Day, there are several other sites that will send information right to your Facebook page. The two feeds I get are from Hoagies Gifted Education Page and Parenting for High Potential. Just search for them within Facebook, subscribe and be amazed at the wealth of information that comes your way. Twitter users can also put in tags to see various threads about gifted education by putting #gifted or #gifteded in the search bar. You may also be interested in the TALENT Act. Next week I will try to address AP classes, what we offer, and why our students should be taking them.
Thanks for supporting your gifted student and contact me with anything you have questions about.
