Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School Grade 1 gifted pull-out - appropriate content

Ugh, I'm thinking of the gifted pull-out I had-- newspaper club-- which consisted of trawling the encyclopedia and writing a story with a banal, faux-cheerful tone. One task was to talk about Canada's first female senator. After 10 minutes of writing, I had the next month's work done; that's how little value the program delivered.

What it should really have been called was the stuff-your-face-with-pizza-and-butt-kiss club. Sickening.

The one good thing about gifted pull-out was that you didn't have to do the soul-deadening work the rest of your class was doing while you were out. (Or maybe we did, and I just blew it off.) And at least our teacher was nice, and could hold an intelligent conversation with us. Plus, she had books in her classroom that you couldn't find in the school library.

In my memory, we did spend an awful lot of time doing Hinky Pinkys and the like, though.

Oh, and I'm also remembering that while novels like Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird had been stripped from the library offerings by overzealous parents by that point, what hadn't were the poetry offerings. So I read Whitman and Plath and saved the Salinger for home. But it was my introduction to a lot of really wonderful poetry, since there was so little other on-level literature in the library at that point. I think that this may have been when the librarian took pity on me and gave me her personal copy of Flowers for Algernon, and later introduced me to Foundation, and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Luckily the junior high librarian liked me better than the elementary school one had. My Central American hummingbird report was fabulous. The diorama, however, was not, and I recall being more than a bit chagrined that it apparently didn't meet her standards. All I had at my disposal was yarn, a stapler, and modeling clay, so I'm not sure what she anticipated was going to happen, but whatever. I'm over her judgy-judgment of my nine year old self. Mostly.

I have always thought we didn't have anything. But I have a clear picture of being outside playing chess with another very bright kid and I don't think there was more than one other game being played. Maybe 'go outside and play chess' was my teacher's idea of enrichment.

I don't remember a lot of pullouts either but I was an "baby buster" and classes were so small they closed elementary schools behind me. I don't think I ever had an elementary class of more than 17 kids in public school. It was when schools were experimenting with new teaching techniques and to my advantage one of those was to let students to do a lot of independent work at their own speed. It was also the era of "new math", something that worked to my advantage as it was something I was good at. I was placed in a 2nd/3rd grade class in 2nd and didn't even realize I was mostly working in the 3rd grade books. And I remember a lot of SRI's & math workbooks we could work through at our own speed.

We had new math too but NZ policy in the 70's was 35 students per class. And I only knew about workbooks from Ramona books we always copied from texts.

I was in MGM in California in the '70's too, and my experience was a bit better.

They taught us Latin roots, though only one per week, and we were supposed to go home and look in the dictionary for words that began with that root. It was a contest to see who could come back with the most the next week. (I never actually did this activity, since I was a bit cynical about a "contest" where everyone was looking at the same source.)

Oh, and at one point we each chose our own topic to do a project on. Mine was ancient Egypt, and they dug up a book of lame stories about Egypt for me, so reading that was what I did for my project.

At least they were trying.

It was mixed age, 4th through 6th, because I remember being in the same group with my older sister. I became increasingly disillusioned as I progressed from 4th to 6th and there were no longer kids older than me. I was frankly shocked at some of the kids from my class who qualified for the program. Looking back, I guess they were MG. Wow was I cynical already at that tender age.

Now that you mention it, we did Latin roots, too, in the mixed grade school I attended after the school with pull-out enrichment. It was for the top group in each two-grade cluster, and went by morphographic spelling. Might have been a similar model, because that school also had semi-independent programming. I entered the 4th/5th cluster midway through 3rd, and then the 5th/6th cluster the next year. And then my parents moved me elsewhere, so I never did reach the point where there were no children older than I. It wasn't technically a GT program, though, probably more like a version of differentiated instruction.

Wow - interesting stories! It all seems so - random.

I was skipped from 2nd to 3rd, but I don't remember any 'enrichment' programs until high school. There was a one-day workshop on 'futuristics' and a conference on 'leadership' (which, being super-introverted, just made me super anxious).

I think DS has his first pull-out session today, so we'll see what he says (if he says anything). I'm hoping that at least he'll get to know the other kids a bit better.