Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments enrichment for all

I am a regular ed. teacher completing the gifted endorsement this summer. We are completing a group project in one of our classes where we want ideas/resources to enhance the curriculum for all students. Our school is a magnet school school and does not offer gifted services. We want a way for teachers to be able to recognize creativity in the classrooms and expound upon this talent with daily lessons...any ideas?

Thanks for asking epainter! That's a brave question. I don't have time to go on and on (fortunately) but here's one and I'll let others chime in.

Give open-ended assignments. For example, if it's volcanoes, be sure that finishing the assignment isn't the ceiling. If they are researching or creating something then some kids will do more (and the kids who do less shouldn't be penalized). Example, my 4th grade son always wrote a 5 paragraph essay when the teacher said to write a five paragraph essay. When he was give a creative writing assignment in 5th grade with no rules, he wrote a book (literally).

Well...I guess I'm wondering why your school doesn't offer gifted services. Some kids are better at learning than others, just like some kids are better at sports than others. Schools seem to be okay with this idea when it involves sports, but not when it involves faster learners.

Does your school district allow mixed ages on varsity and JV teams? In PE class, do the faster runners have to slow down and wait for the other kids to catch up? Denying services to bright and gifted kids is a lot like making good runners wait near the finish line so that everyone will finish at the same time.

Val

Here are some recommendations from the Davidson Institute's Educator's Guild (a free service):

http://www.davidsongifted.org/edguild/Article/Educators_Guild_Helping_Gifted_Students_334.aspx

I don't know what grades you have in the magnet school, but I love the Core Knowledge Curriculum for integrated creative projects (see the lesson plans on their website for teachers). For American History, they had quilt-making and folk tales and folk music. Everything had extension studies and thematic study in literature, arts, music, etc -- with great projects.

Oh - and just very random thoughts re: your subject "enrichment for all." My idea of enrichment is something interesting and creative and fun that all students can benefit from, whereas gifted education is providing appropriate challenges to students who need it. Many times providing just enrichment to gifted kids, which to most people looks like fun, will create resentment from the kids who are not getting it. So I applaud giving "enrichment" to all. However, most gifted kids need more than enrichment. What they need will be challenges at their level/speed, which will not look like fun to the kids who do not need it and thus are not getting it - it will look like hard work. Also, please make sure that the gifted kids who are given more challenging work don't have to do the other work assigned to the rest of the class - it should not be punishment for them to get appropriate challenges. Just very quick random thoughts...

Agreed; piling on too much work can create a dislike of school.

I think it's important to remember that a lot of gifted kids can simply skip some things because they understand some concepts intuitively. Example, my four-year-old can spell easy and medium words (dog, like, happy, day etc.). They were testing her for a skip and noted a "gap" in not "being able to identify the middle sound in a word."

It's not that she can't "identify the middle sound." It's that she doesn't know this particular vocabulary. More importantly, she has an intuitive understanding of the order of the letters in a word and can lay them out on paper. She doesn't need to go through the first-middle-last sound drills because she figured out the underlying concepts for herself.

Similarly, kids who can add/subtract in their heads when they're very young can just skip the methods that are used to teach the concepts of these operations (e.g. Rule-in, Rule-out, basic manipulatives).

It's probably hard to understand that some kids are much further ahead than their ages would suggest, or that they can get ahead without drilling on standard techniques. So sometimes teachers can get hung up on making them proficient at a technique before they'll even check to see if the child is already way beyond the underlying concept.


I guess sometimes people forget that the goal is to learn the concepts and not the individual techniques. Gifted kids (like anyone, really) can get very frustrated if they're forced to learn something they already know before being allowed to move to something else that they already know.

Val

I think the open ended project style is what seems to work best for most gts. A possibility would be the following: let's say that you're studying bugs and you have ladybugs in the area. Have the kids catch a bug each and make a little home for them in glass jars with a cover with holes and let the kids put what they feel it needs to survive in the jars. Then have them draw a picture of the bug, write questions they have about the bugs and write observations about where they found the bug and how they made it's house. Then give them the following options and have them complete at least 2: write a story with a lady bug as the main character, write a poem about the lady bug, write a song about lady bugs, make a model of the lady bug. Then as a class compile the questions everyone has and research the answers. Or ask for volunteers to do the research and report the info back to the class.
This gives you an idea of what level they students are thinking at, as well as allowing you the openness to assess their work on a sliding scale. Using a rubric with different levels of proficiency as a guide to assessing the work also shows the students what areas they need to improve in and what areas they have down pat.

Here's a link to a great Blog that i read weekly...she is a gifted teacher and has some wonderful ideas...wish she taught in our state!
http://www.parentinggiftedkids.com/

Hi Val, thanks for your question. I teach in a magnet school and the district doesn't feel that we need the funding for gifted. The gifted department has been pushing for services to be offered for years. Students may go back to the zone school and receive the services but if they stay at the magnet school the gifted services are not offered. On a more positive note...the county offered to pay for this endorsement for anyone interested in taking the courses and 4 teachers from my school signed up. There would have been more but the books alone were over $400 and we have to cough that up out of pocket. Now that I have researched gifted I realize there is so much that I have no clue about. Reg. Ed. teachers are not taught how to differentiate the curriculum in a meaningful way for gifted and talented students so this is fascinating to me Any practical ideas are welcome.

Thank you St. Pauli Girl! I will check it out!

thank you for your ideas benny! I will certainly try that approach.

Great ideas Kerry! Thank you!

I found a book by Susan Winebrenner, "Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom", online and there was just an excerpt...thought this would be a great avenue to travel down for our group project in the tests and measurements class...The 4 teachers from the magnet school just want ideas and effective ways to incorporate enrichment and acceleration into our reg. ed. classrooms so that all students needs are met. Thanks for your responses!

The grade I teach is 3rd. We also have a 1st, 4th and another 3rd grade teacher from my school attending the endorsement classes.

Here's another blog by a gifted ed teacher that i really like. Tamara Fisher has great ideas:

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/unwrapping_the_gifted/

My DD's school has recently gotten that book by Winebrenner and it looks like a really good one. (I had a chance to check it out near the end of the school year, I am also a teacher, but am not currently working.)

A project that was done with some students in our building this year was based on Dear America. The opportunity was offered to students who enjoy writing, and to students who enjoyed drawing. It basically worked like this:

Students read/examined Dear America books

They then chose a time period of interest to them and researched what life was like in our state during that time period

Students wrote their own Dear America story, then worked with one of the illustrators to discuss the story.

Illustrators took over and created illustrations for the book.


In order to work on the project, students involved in the research/writing met for 45 minutes in the LMC (with librarian and an instructional resource teacher) 3 days per week. They were allowed to miss class without being asked to make up the work. They were also allowed some time to read for their project within the reading block.

Overall the experience was very good for students. If I recall correctly, the writing part of the project took place over the course of about six weeks.

epainter - I applaud you for embarking on this endeavor! YEAH! I 2nd Tamara Fischer's website. A book I found helpful in understanding that different gifted kids need different things was a book titled Reforming Gifted Education. If I remember correctly, I read a portion of it through googlebooks.

I agree w/ someone above that enrichment for all is great. Too many gifted programs are enrichment which breeds resentment. I hope your school is successful in giving enrichment for all which I think is needed but also giving gifted kids what they need.

Parenting Gifted kids by James R. Delisle, just in its first few chapter will give you some ideas about how to view gifted kids and enrichment differently.

Thank you all so much for your responses! I have a few more questions...maybe you can help! Do you believe there are certain characteristics that are associated with gifted and talented children and youth? If so, what do you believe those are? Secondly, how would you compare historical and contemporary identification of gifted and talented? I know in GA creativity plays a key role. Is it like that in other states? Has creativity always been a primary focus?

Characteristics of my DD7 are

Likes to learn, more intense than her peers, school does not end at 2:30
sensitive to changes and stimulation
intense imagination and fears
Rules and fairness are VERY important

For regular school purposes, creativity does not play a role in GT identification in Florida.

epainter,

I think it is wonderful that you and your fellow teachers are willing to learn and adapt your classrooms to include the needs of gifted kids. My district does not have a gifted program and the few around here who do offer only occasional pull-out classes starting at 4th grade. My dream is to have a team of special education teachers (in this case educated in giftedness) who work with the regular classrooms teachers to help them differentiate the curriculum same as the more traditional special-ed teachers.
We put a lot of unreasonable expectations on classroom teachers these days in having them meet the academic/social needs of such a wide range of abilities and then add the pressure of high stakes testing into the mix. I really do applaud you for your efforts!

My ds's school provided books in a "browsing box" for kids to read. The books offered corresponded to the topics they were studying in science and social studies at the time. When kids had extra time, they could read about Egypt when they were studying Egypt. Books at different levels allow the kids to read at their own level. Even if the higher-level readers started with the easy books, they would quickly move on to the harder ones.

Also, the school allows the kids to test out of material they already Words Their Way. For math, they provide extra materials for the ones who tested out to work on independently. They used Contental Math League questions for this. In order to do the extra math, the students and parents had to sign a contract (I will not brag about doing extra math, I will not disrupt the class to ask about what I am working on, etc).

Has anyone ever used the William and Mary Observation scale out there or have any knowledge about it? I have found a classroom scale and a student scale and both are used to evaluate teachers on their methods of delivering instruction...I think.

Another question...how do you evaluate the gifted programs? I have talked to several teachers and they say the only evaluation currently used is an end of the year questionnaire given to the studnets-sort of asking them how they benefitted from gifted services. I also talked to one teacher and she said the midterm and final evaluations she gives to students are how the program is evaluated...any other ideas?

Keet,
It sounds like your school is using a lot of techniques from the Susan Weinbrenner materials (I know her work has been cited in other threads). It's nice to hear that it's being systematically incorporated somewhere. Is it a classroom specific implementation or is it used school wide?