3rd Grade Update: A Shocking Discovery!

In third grade we have the fortune of studying one of the most fascinating people in American history--Benjamin Franklin. Rather than a traditional biography study, though, we jumped right in with a survey of many of his incredible inventions and how they led to modern manifestations. For example, did you know that Benjamin Franklin invented the first odometer to track the mileage he put on his horse buggy when he was the post man of Philadelphia? Then...

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2nd Grade Update: Toys as Tools (for learning!)

You can imagine the excitement the first day of class when I announced our topic this year would be toys! What we soon discovered, however, was that there was a lot more to it than simply "playing." First, we used toys as a tool for exploring the power of brainstorming and practiced FFOE creative thinking skills. Next, we used the book Tomorrow's Alphabet as inspiration to create our own alphabet called Yesterday's Toy Alphabet. Rather than try...

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1st Grade Update: 8 Kinds of Smart

What does it mean to be "gifted" at something? Does being gifted mean being smart at everything? These are some basic but very important questions we've been answering with some bibliotherapy (using literature as a self-learning tool) the first few weeks of 1st grade GT. We used a series of wonderful books by the actor John Lithgow. Each book is centered on a character with a special, but specific, type of giftedness. For Farkle McBride it's musical...

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Class Norms

This is NOT what the GT classroom looks like, except on Twilight Zone days. With one week under our belt we now hope to develop a productive rhythm from week to week. One huge part of that is understanding expectations and classroom norms. A particular challenge of a pull-out learning situation is that every minute is so precious that there is no time to be squandering them on basic discipline issues. For that reason, I keep the classroom management...

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Article: Debunking the Genius Myth

One of the keys to developing a growth mindset is not just believing, but feeling with every cell of your body that you are a growing, evolving person and that choices you make today will affect the person you are tomorrow. A fixed mindset would have us believe that we either ARE or we AREN'T--you are either a genius or you are not, for example. In that model, there's no room for hard work or for setbacks and definitely no reason to take the risk...

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