Gifted

Conference schedule at the end!

My apologies for not keeping up to date with this blog. I've been busier than usual for a while and here's why: I'm back in school. See, I'm a super education nerd. I love following what's happening in education in America and around the world. Teaching excites me. Curriculum excites me. Some people knit, some people play music, some people travel. I follow current curriculum and instruction trends.  I KNOW! I who DOESN'T enjoy that stuff, right? Well, apparently a lot of folks. I apologize in advance if you ever get stuck sitting next to me at a dinner party; I'm really quite a yawn to everyone but fellow teachers.

 This is all quite funny, considering that I was far from a perfect student as a child. I was adequately bright, fairly creative, and very, very (undiagnosed until college) ADD. I went to a super progressive local private school filled with other bright, creative kids. Among them, though, I was fairly average. As I got older, this "fairly average" left me behind many of my brilliant, able-to-pay-attention-in-class peers. According to my parents, of course, I was (and still am) highly gifted. Thanks Mom and Dad, but the reality was I was not anywhere close to what they call "Gifted". And, no, even if I had been given some magical pill to take away the attention difficulties, I still wouldn't have qualified as gifted by today's standards. I know this because I have tried those magical pills. They totally helped with my focus, but it's not like I suddenly started rocking out quadratic equations in my sleep or anything. That's like saying if I dye my hair blond I will suddenly have Heidi Klum's modeling career. Genetically, I only have so much material to work with.

So, why, then, am I back in school getting my Gifted certification?

Because every year I have at least one student in my class who I believe would qualify for gifted services in their local public school. I know, however, that many of these students have not or would not yet thrive in a traditional school setting. I have always had an interest in the "Twice-exceptional" student. I've worked with students with special needs for long enough to realize that many of them don't fit into just one category. You can be ADHD and gifted. You can have Sensory Integration Disorder and be gifted. I know that Autism and giftedness can exist together, as well. Unfortunately, difficulty with learning in a traditional setting often excludes many students from gifted programs. I've had students who absolutely could not remain in a traditional classroom, yet their innate understanding of mathematics was far beyond their years. I've had students who could not read by the age of 9, yet their creativity was astounding. Most public schools are able to work with slight variances from the norm. If you are a bit distracted in class, they can work with you. If you test off the charts, but lack motivation, they can work with you. If you test off the charts, yet have frequent, severe meltdowns, there is not a place for you. If you are so dysregulated that you are a constant disruption in your classroom of 25 students, chances are the school is not able to focus on your gifts, or even recognize that you have them.



Here is what I have discovered in my Gifted program thus far:

Every single thing we do at the Hirsch Academy is right on target for ALL students. Interest based, often individualized, developmentally appropriate curriculum? Focus on critical thinking, relating and communicating? Group and individual problem solving? We love this stuff at Hirsch!

Not to brag, but I'm starting to feel like a gifted rock star. Each week, my class discussion group leaves me more and more convinced that the way we work with children is the way all schools should work with children. The other teachers in my cohort are often amazed at what I tell them about Hirsch. Either they are amazed, or just faking it and being polite because they must be sick of me saying "Oh, yeah, we already do that where I teach." I know nobody likes a know-it-all, but it's true. We already do many of the things we are learning about in this class.  So that's been pretty validating.

So, excuse me while I stretch my Heidi Klum long legs out, flex my Einsteinian brain a bit, and show you what the students in Amanda and Erin's class for the gifted and talented have been working on recently:



Math:
Adding and subtracting with and without regrouping (carrying), multiplication, division, fact families

Graphing: bar graphs, pictographs, line graphs, adding scale to graphs, statistical analysis (mode, median, mean)

Measurement: inches, feet, yards, centimeters, meters, grams, kilograms

Reading:
The 12 Labors of Hercules, Half Magic, Beezus and Ramona

Science:
DINOSAURS!

Geography:
Traveling the southeastern part of the United States, thanks to our interactive "Go Noodle" movement game. Ask your child to tell you where we have been so far!

Writing, writing, writing, writing!!!
Summarizing and report writing. Improving vocabulary and spelling through editing, homophones, vocabulary, tricky vowel digraphs, sequencing, point of view.

Here are some pre-Spring Break dinosaur egg math pictures:

Here are some shots from this weeks' math:

They have been reading, listening to, and watching various versions of The 12 Labors of Hercules. They have become quite adept at sequencing and summarizing the stories in their writing. At first, this was quite a "laborious" process. Getting the sequence of the story, adding interesting details, attending to grammar, punctuation, spelling and neatness seemed to be quite a "Herculean" task. But after practicing 12 times, we are old pros! Stay tuned for the student theater production of the Labors.

In addition, each student is writing their own 12 Labors.
 Some stories to look forward to:

Maxcules and the Giant Spider
Tani Defeats the Stilton Shayna (with apologies to his sister...she has become a "zapping monster")
Gabriel vs. The Fatal Wolf
Zoe Rides a Wild African Zebra
Annabellacules Befriends Darth Vader

Here's a peek at our "Go Noodle" map:

Our final conferences for the year will be on Friday, May 2nd

9:00 Tani
10:00 Max
11:00 Bo
1:00 Gabriel
2:00 Annabella
3:00 Zoe

Also, please let me know the weight and length of your child at birth. We're going to do a fun "newborn" measuring activity sometime in the coming weeks.

And the Academy Award for Best Picture Goes to....

Are you wondering why you see this when you look out your window?

Sorry, I forgot to warn you.

I'm sure you've heard of this little thing called the Academy Awards. They're happening this Sunday. There are some amazing movies nominated this year:

Captain Phillips, American Hustle and 12 Years a Slave are all worthy of winning that coveted Oscar for Best Picture.

My bet, however, is for a small, local production. An independent film, written, directed and produced by a team of rising stars. The critics have called it a "Cinematic Tour de Force!" and proclaimed it an"Epic Thrill Ride!" 

I completely agree and plan on watching the Academy Awards on Sunday night as this masterpiece takes home the coveted gold statue.

What film am I talking about?

I present to you...

The War:Persues VS. Medusa

Also known as: Medusa's Lair

See for yourself what the buzz is all about!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reSlzxdZN28

Isn't that awesome? This project has been quite a while in the making. After reading several versions of Medusa, the students wrote this version. It's quite a complicated story, and this was a good way for me to assess their understanding. Obviously, they know the story inside and out! They constructed the puppets on their own and patiently endured the long process of rehearsing, blocking, and filming the movie. They have not yet seen the full, edited production, so feel free to watch it as a family ("A Feel Good Hit for the Whole Family!").

So, sorry about the paparazzi in your driveway. Just make sure to apply lipstick and shades before you leave the house. 

I can't wait to see you all Sunday night at the Oscars. I should be easy to spot; I'm borrowing a dress from a friend:

 

Appetite for Assessment

Authentic: Adjective: According to the Amanda English Dictionary (Unabridged version), this word is defined as

Real or genuine.  
True and Accurate.

Ah, the strive for authenticity in today's culture. It's a marketing buzzword meaning "Getting back to what matters in life: the simple things". Farm to table, urban chicken coops, fiddle playing band members with beards so bushy they can hide an entire West Elm Authentic Moroccan Rug within.

We want everything to be Real. Simple (Wait, that sounds like a great name for a magazine!). I mean, we want to really get back to our roots. A time when life was about beekeeping and churning butter. When men were, well, hairy, and women were crafty. Or vice versa.



 Heck, even the trendy cookware store, Williams-Sonoma  has an Agrarian division. I know local farmers are elbowing their way into the Lenox Mall store to get a hold of their Butter Making Kit  (including Rooster Butter Stamp)!

"Just add cream for fresh, flavorful butter in 20 minutes...A Bas-relief rooster image adds a flourish to fresh churned butter"

There's also the "Wood Five Drawer Apple Rack". I mean, it's got 5 DRAWERS FOR  YOUR APPLES. It's handcrafted in Europe and will only put you out $349.95.

How 'bout them apples???

If your apples ain't sorted and your butter ain't stamped, then I seriously question your commitment to authenticity.

Here at Hirsch we love to keep up with the trends. So of course I'm all about authenticity. I'm even letting my beard grow as we speak. Just kidding, I shaved this morning. I'm actually talking about AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENTS.

What is an authentic assessment? First, let's talk about Traditional Assessments. These are the multiple choice, fill-in-the-blanks, true or false tests. These can be (cue scary music) standardized tests or teacher created tests. The answer is on the page, the student just has to find it and bubble it in.

These tests are not inherently bad, though. We do some here: KeyMath and the TOWRE reading are standardized. Just this week the students watched a video and completed a fill in the blank (aka "cloze" in teacherese) activity to demonstrate comprehension. But not every student performs well on these types of tests. I'm no dummy, but if I told you my SAT scores your jaw would hit the floor. You know how you get points for filling in your name? My score (after taking 2 prep classes) was only a smidge higher than that. So while these traditional assessments are a great, quick, down and dirty way to get information on a child, they are only part of the big picture.

Thank you to Jon Mueller's blog: http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/whatisit.htm for giving a clear picture of how Authentic Assessment is different from Traditional Assessment:

Authentic Assessment

In contrast (to Traditional Assessment), authentic assessment (AA) springs from the following reasoning and practice:

1. A school's mission is to develop productive citizens.
2. To be a productive citizen, an individual must be capable of performing meaningful tasks in the real world.
3. Therefore, schools must help students become proficient at performing the tasks they will encounter when they graduate.
4. To determine if it is successful, the school must then ask students to perform meaningful tasks that replicate real world challenges to see if students are capable of doing so.

Thus, in AA, assessment drives the curriculum.  That is, teachers first determine the tasks that students will perform to demonstrate their mastery, and then a curriculum is developed that will enable students to perform those tasks well, which would include the acquisition of essential knowledge and skills.  This has been referred to as planning backwards (e.g., McDonald, 1992).

If I were a golf instructor and I taught the skills required to perform well, I would not assess my students' performance by giving them a multiple choice test.  I would put them out on the golf course and ask them to perform.  Although this is obvious with athletic skills, it is also true for academic subjects.  We can teach students how to do math, do history and do science, not just know them.  Then, to assess what our students had learned, we can ask students to perform tasks that "replicate the challenges" faced by those using mathematics, doing history or conducting scientific investigation.

Traditional --------------------------------------------- Authentic

Selecting a Response ------------------------------------ Performing a Task

Contrived --------------------------------------------------------------- Real-life

Recall/Recognition ------------------------------- Construction/Application

Teacher-structured ------------------------------------- Student-structured

Indirect Evidence -------------------------------------------- Direct Evidence

These 2 types of assessments are not mutually exclusive. Many of the children at Hirsch are not ready for traditional assessments, so the teachers rely solely on authentic activities to assess mastery. The students in our room are able to do both.  The benefits of authentic assessment are huge. Often, while we are looking for a specific skill, we encounter so much more than we thought. We get so much information from real life and high interest tasks, that sometimes we find the students have skills far beyond what the tests show. Conversely, a student who aces a test might have difficulty demonstrating a skill in the real world.
And let's face it, in the real world no one hands you a sheet of paper and asks you to do this:

Here is an example of how we are constantly challenging, assessing, and looking for evidence of growth and mastery in our room.


PIZZA FRACTION CHALLENGE:

We've been learning about fractions for the past several weeks. Many of the students have become quite proficient at identifying parts to the whole, sorting fractions by size, and some even recognizing equivalent fractions. We use fractions throughout the day, all day, every day,without the students even realizing.

"Hey, Tani, can you hand me 1/3 of the crayons in your hand?"
"Zoe, you only need to finish 1/4 of the problems on that page."
"We are going to watch 1/2 of the Medusa movie today. How much will we watch tomorrow to finish it?"

Things got real (authentically real, that is) on Wednesday when solving a serious fraction puzzler was the ticket to a delicious lunch of homemade pizza. Annabella and Zoe were our chefs, but before we cooked the pizza we asked the students to figure out how to divide it evenly. Their first task was to draw their idea on paper and then transfer their ideas to the board. We learned so much from this activity:

1. All of our students can apply their knowledge of fractions to a real life problem (yay!)
2. Some of our students have a firm grasp on equivalent fractions. A couple are still a little shaky, but can get there with teacher prompting.
3. A couple of our students are still unable to cross mid line. What does this mean? Here's a web page to explain http://www.therapystreetforkids.com/CrossingMidline.html
Shelley is also a great resource on this subject.

Then something really interesting happened as we compared our ideas:

Student A has a very firm understanding of fractions. This kid can manipulate numbers far above his grade level (or, for that matter, far above my grade level). Student A also loves pizza. A lot. A whole lot. So much so, that when it came down to deciding if we should divide the pizza into 7 equal parts (one slice each) or 14 equal parts (2 slices each) he was visibly agitated when the majority of the class wanted one large slice. Student A knows (and I have witnessed) that he can eat an inhuman amount of pizza in one sitting. One slice? Are you kidding???
Student B, who also has a firm grasp on fractions, was able to explain that Student A would get the same amount of pizza either way.  By six or seven, most children develop the ability to conserve number, length, and liquid volume.  Conservation refers to the idea that a quantity remains the same despite changes in appearance. Nothing was added to the pizza, nothing taken away, it was just going to be cut differently. This is a concept that Student A knows on paper. Give him 2 equal sized balls of clay, flatten one, and he can tell you they are still the same size. We know this from other authentic and traditional assessments. But when his emotions were involved, he was unable to demonstrate this knowledge. Finally, Student C, who up until then we were not sure truly understood the concept of conservation, chimed in:
"Either way you slice it, you get the same amount. What if you just cut it in two on your plate?"

Aha! Problem solved!That's exactly the kind of valuable group problem solving we see every day, many times a day, using authentic assessment. You just can't get that kind of information on a standardized test.

We will use the information we learned on Pizza day to drive our curriculum. We know one child's academic knowledge can be easily hijacked by emotions (he's certainly not the only one), so more highly emotional problem solving activities are needed (our specialty :)). We know we need to do some more crossing mid-line activities, more conservation activities, continue to strengthen and build knowledge of fractions. We also know pizza is yummy.
But you didn't need an assessment to figure that out, did you?

Of Pack Rats and Rat Skulls

POP QUIZ:

What do all of these items have in common?

1. 1 bag of googly eyes
2. A guitar
3. A dented mailbox
4. 4-6 fish tanks
5. 1 dead octopus floating in formaldehyde
6. Several partially used boxes of elbow macaroni
7. A Be-Dazzler
8. A bag full of plastic Pokemon characters
9. A rubber chicken
10. A clothesline
11. An ice cream maker
12. 17 empty shoe boxes
13. A container of empty toilet paper rolls
14. A circa 1971 Jackson 5 poster 
15. A snakeskin 

Give up?

They can all be found in our class' Teachers' Supply Closet. I know, it's a bit disturbing. You actually need a helmet to enter this closet. Merely opening the door can cause an avalanche of school supplies and science materials.  I've had to dig Ms. Erin out of the wreckage so many times that I finally had her sign a waver fully exonerating me should she emerge with a pan balance and fraction cubes lodged in her skull. But there is beauty in this chaos. The ability to pull out the most random materials at the perfect time makes my out of control hording almost worth it.

Case in point:

Meet Larry the Body.

Larry has been with me for years. For a while he lived in my son's bedroom, until the boy ended up in my bed sobbing one night because he was sure he'd seen Larry's eye wink at him in the moonlight. I figured I'd decrease future therapy bills by moving Larry to a new home in, you guessed it, The Teachers' Supply Closet. And there he rested until Erin and I pulled him out for show and tell this week. As always, he generated a lot of excitement. The kids quickly pulled out his organs and used a magnetic puzzle to try to identify them. We talked about the different organs and systems of the body. Interestingly, the students were insistent that only boys have kidneys. It took us a few minutes to figure out that they were confusing kidneys with some other boy parts that are also found in pairs, if you get my drift. They also let me know in no uncertain terms that Larry was actually a Loretta, due to his missing, ahem, parts (no, once again, NOT kidneys).

The kids were especially curious about the digestive system. No big surprise, as poop and pee are highly entertaining to the elementary school set. And since it was right before lunch, what better time to talk about it? We watched a quick movie about the digestive system, and then got to eating and read aloud time.

We have been reading aloud one of my favorites, "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" by Beverly Cleary.

In the chapter we read that day, we learned about the sad fate of Ralph the Mouse's Uncle Leroy. Uncle Leroy vanished without a trace...until his bones turned up in an owl pellet.

"What's an owl pellet?" the kids wanted to know. I explained that when owls eat their food, they digest the soft parts (meat), but feathers, fur and bones are indigestible to most owls. The owls regurgitate these parts in the form of a "pellet". Yep, they throw it up.

 The kids gasped in horror, "EWWWW!!!"

 Ms. Erin, who is eating lunch on the other side of the room, overhears this and says, "We have owl pellets."

"We DO?" I had no idea.

Sure enough, the magical realm of The Teachers' Supply Closet was home to 10 owl pellets. I tell you, all this time and I had no clue they were there. Seriously, how can someone not know they have owl vomit and rat bones in their closet?

Apparently, Erin and former Hirsch teacher Ms. Tara had dissected them years ago, and they had been stuffed up in a corner, just waiting for the right moment.

Most of the students were super excited, if a little freaked out.  One sweet boy told me I was crazy, because there was NO WAY he was going to dig rat bones out of a wad of owl puke. Well, he didn't say it quite so crudely, but you get the gist. So we started slowly, with a "virtual" dissection. Here is the web site:

http://www.kidwings.com/owlpellets/flash/v4/index.htm

How cool is that?!?

Now check out the pictures from the real dissection on Thursday. The excitement in the room was at an all time high as we pulled out and identified rat skeletons from our pellets. Gross? Yes. Totally, awesomely gross. But educational.

Gabriel digs in

An intact pellet and a bone

Skull!!

Max's boneyard

Can you identify this body part?

Dem bones

Claw or jaw?

Tibia or fibula?

Mad scientist

Yes, your children will come home with a bag of rat femurs. Yes, they are disgusting.  You may be cursing us now, but you'll thank us when your child graduates from medical school.


 The Teachers' Supply Closet also gifted us with Legos this week for our fraction lesson. Check it out:

How many different ways can you make 1 whole?  2/8+1/4+1/2=1 whole!

So, yeah, there are some pretty awesome treasure to be found in The Teachers' Supply Closet. But all of the goodies in closet are no match for the goodness and pure hearts of our students.
 We reflected on the deeds and words of Dr. Martin Luther King at the end of the week. The students were asked to write a personal narrative telling about their dreams for the world. Here are a couple that I filmed:


Zoe's Dream:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXIwIjrbuh0


Bo's Dream:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wBGZGbbFyw

Gabriel's Dream
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O1nufWilAc


Tani's Dream:

I think people should not drink beer. People should not because it makes them drive crazy and go to jail. I think people should not go on Ferris wheels if they are afraid of heights. They will freak and they will scream.

Max's Dream:

People's manners need to change. Because it's not polite and it's not nice. It can also disturb others the way we talk and eat and movement has to be polite. People need to be fair in games.


Annabella's Poem:

PEACE
Peace is like a prayer
Peace looks like a rainbow
It sounds like birds singing, and
it can be calming, but peace is always a good thing.


Have a wonderful and peaceful long weekend!