Pinteresting Boards for G/T & HOTS

Collaborative Pinterest boards for Gifted & Talented,  Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), enrichment, and differentiated instruction!

If you follow my blog, you know that these topics are near and dear to my heart.  You also know that I have been posting lists of collaborative boards on specific topics; kindergarten and 1st grade, to date.  But when I tried to compile a list of Pinterest boards for G/T, HOTS, enrichment, and differentiation, I did not get very far.  Here's what I have been able to find:

• Teaching Critical Thinking & Problem Solving
• Critical Thinking Skills
• Creative & Critical Thinking Activities & Ideas
• Brain Teasers & Twisters
• Differentiation Ideas & Resources
• Gifted Education Ideas & Products
• Gifted Ed Resources & Info
• Gifted on TpT - K - 8
• Gifted on TpT - High School
• Gifted & Talented Teaching Resources
• Activities for Gifted & Talented Students
• Gifted and Talented teaching ideas K-8

So, I'm asking for your help.  If you know of any collaborative boards for G/T, enrichment, HOTS, and/or differentiation, will you please post the link in a comment?  Then I can expand this list to make it more comprehensive.   

Thanks!

Family Reading Night

It's time, teachers, to celebrate National Children's Book Week.  

At my school, we have Family Reading Night in which families return to school in the evening. They are encouraged to visit up to 3 rooms where guest readers are sharing some favorite books. Our committee works hard to find some local celebrities to read.  We implore radio personalities, the weather girl on the local TV station, a player or coach from the U of I's athletic teams, ...  Ironically, the most popular reader is always the retired kindergarten teacher who touched so many of our children's lives and invoked their love of literature.

One of my favorite activities for National Children's Book Week incorporates my passion for poetry.  I share the following poem with my students:

I love to challenge my kiddos' creativity while helping them focus on the /ook/ rime.  To that end, I point out the lines,

          "Chefs read cookbooks,

          Pirates?  'Hook' books!

          Little kids read lift-and-look books!"

Working together, we think up other "-ook" books and readers.  For example, fishermen read bait and hook books.  Or, Chess players read rook books.  My students never fail to amaze me with the lines they create.   The all-time favorite line came from a student who had just returned from vacation in the Pacific NW.  Her line was "[Native Americans] read Chinook books."  (I inserted the pc term; she actually said, "Indians.")  Can you imagine???

If you are looking for a set of books that promote reading and a love of literature, I recommend the following:

• Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair by Patricia Polacco
• The School Mouse by Dick King-Smith
• Wild About Books by Judy Sierra
• Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen
• Born to Read by Judy Sierra
• Reading Makes You Feel Good by Todd Parr
• The Best Book to Read by Debbie Bertram & Susan Bloom
• The Best Place to Read by Debbie Bertram & Susan Bloom
• The Best Time to Read by Debbie Bertram & Susan Bloom
• Miss Brooks Loves Books (And I Don't) by Barbara Bottner

If you like this poem and activity, you can find more fall poetry, teaching points, skill lessons, and activities in my product, Poetry Possibilities - Fall.

It is available in my TpT Store or in my TN Shop.

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GR8 PL8

It’s about time, teachers, for some creativity!  Here’s a fun project that is sure to get your students’ creative juices flowing.

Challenge your students’ creativity with vanity license plates.  Vanity plates are car license plates that convey a personalized message using just 8 letters and/or numbers.  Many vanity plates have cryptic messages that symbolize something important to the owner.  The message may tell something about the person’s:

appearance --   

personality --

accomplishment --

occupation -- 

or philosophy --

Present several examples, asking your students to deduce the meaning.  This will get your class into the right frame of mind for creating vanity plates. Then challenge them to design 2 vanity plates. 

The first license plate should describe someone or something well known.  For example:

• A famous person like Abe Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, or Christopher Columbus
• An occupation such as cook, artist, or computer programmer
• A fictional character like Cinderella, Superman, or the 7 dwarves
• A fictional place such as Never-Never Land or the Land of Oz
• A well-known site such as Mount Rushmore or the Eiffel Tower
• An historic event like the 1^st moon landing or the Civil War

The second license plate should describe something unique to the student.  It may be a personality trait, a favorite activity, a goal, an accomplishment, or a message s/he wishes to express. 

Encourage your students to think of several ideas before selecting the license plates that suit them best.  Fluency of ideas often leads to increased creativity.  Distribute 2 templates to your students and encourage them to use upper case letters.  Numbers can be used for words (1 for ONE or WON, 8 for EIGHT or ATE).  Alternate or incomplete spellings are absolutely acceptable (CS for SEES or SEAS, or EZ DUZ IT).  

Display the vanity plates on a bulletin board in the hall.  Then prepare for traffic jams as spectators gather to decipher the messages.  

You can download all the materials for this project for FREE at my TpT Store or TN Shop

 Enjoy!

Sneak into a New School Year -- Pt. 5

It's about time, teachers... to finish up Sneaker Day.

It's never too early to start your class writing stories.  For Sneaker Day, bring in an old, worn out, holey pair of sneakers.  Write a story as a whole class, giving the sneakers a history from the day they were made until today. 

Older and/or more capable students could write a chapter a day, giving you, the teacher, the opportunity to model writing traits and to "think out loud" as you record their ideas. Younger and/or less capable students could write a simple story about who wore the sneakers, where they have traveled, how the sneakers got their holes, etc.  Again, acting as the recorder, the teacher should model her thinking as she write the children's ideas.

Another activity for Sneaker Day is to give each child a blank sneaker outline.

Google doc

Ask them to design a new sneaker that is especially for school children.  What would they include in their special sneaker?  A calculator?  A ruler?  A computer?  A pencil sharpener? . . .  Extend this activity by having the students write about their sneaker's features.

Hopefully, you can use these Sneaker Day ideas to get your new school year off on the right foot!

If you liked these Sneaker Day activities, you may wish to download a copy of the them for FREE on TpT.

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Hooray for Hats thematic unit FREEBIE

It's about time, teachers, to start planning for the new school year.  As a primary teacher, I {heart} thematic units. Immersing children in a topic, carrying it across disciplines, and finding creative ways to meet the Common Core Standards are my passion.  One of my favorite thematic units is Hooray for Hats.  

This unit integrates ELA, math, HOTS, and creativity.  It is intended to last for 1 week, but I freely admit that I usually stretch it into 3 weeks.  There are so many hat related books to read aloud, so many writing topics, so many math activities, ...


The ELA components include vocabulary work, comprehension, poetry, alphabetical order, writing center ideas, and a 14 page booklet for students to make about Hat Idioms. You can download the Hat Idioms Book for FREE on TpT or TN.  Following is a preview of the Hat Idioms Book:

Hooray for Hats! math activities include computation, graphing, patterns, Venn Diagrams, journal prompts, sorting, measurement, and money.  Following is an example from the math portion:

Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) are also included in Hooray for Hats!  There are homework assignment sheets and a craftivity.  If you like thematic units, I hope you will check out Hooray for Hats!

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HOTS or Bloom's Taxonomy

It's about time, teachers, ... to revisit Higher Order Thinking Skills or HOTS.  If you've been a teacher for more than 5 minutes, you must have some knowledge of Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.  Did you know Benjamin is not actually the author of the taxonomy?  It bears his name simply because he chaired the committee that developed it.  So, the next time someone asks you to chair a committee, you may want to say "Yes."

It seems like Bloom's Taxonomy has been around forever.  Actually, it's been around since 1956, which for most of the educators at work today IS forever.  It's been 56 years and it's still going strong.  Although, it has morphed some over the decades.  When 1st proposed, the taxonomy strove to deal with 3 domains of education: cognitive, affective, & psychomotor.  The goal of the 3 domains was to produce holistic education.  Over time, however, the cognitive domain has become the taxonomy we all think of when Bloom's Taxonomy is mentioned.  In fact, each domain was to have it's own handbook, but after publishing the cognitive domain  handbook, it took 8 years for the affective domain handbook to be written and the psychomotor domain handbook was never written!

Too often, I think, the taxonomy is taught and used in educating gifted and talented learners.  That may be a matter of practicality.  The taxonomy is scaffolded; the lower levels must be broad and strong in order for the upper levels to be built. In an age of standardized testing mania, knowledge and comprehension, the foundation levels, are the name of the game. Since those are the most easily evaluated components, performance is naturally based on those levels.  And so, I surmise that only the teachers of G/T have the time to work on the upper levels of the taxonomy since their students, presumably, have the requisite knowledge and understanding.    

Let's not dwell in the basement, teachers!  It takes more work to bring your students to the upper levels of the taxonomy. The payoff, however, is well worth the effort.  Who doesn't want to spend their time in the penthouse rather than the basement?

Following is Bloom's Taxonomy model in 2 versions:

Any student of the taxonomy knows that there are lists of verbs to help us remember how to incorporate each level into our teaching.  While I am a visual learner, perusing those lists tends to make my eyes roll to the back of my head.  So, I created the following visual to expeditiously remind me what each level should look like.

I don't know if Easter eggs brought this to mind or the hatchlings that spring promises us, but I do know that teachers everywhere need to break out of their shells and push their students to work in the higher levels.  Our children deserve to be grade A educated.

Now I'll climb down from my soap box and get back to dyeing eggs.

Luck o' the Irish FREEBIE

It's about time, teachers . . . for  a St. Patrick's Day FREEBIE.  Luck o' the Irish is a creative activity I designed for my G/T students.  It challenges 2 of the 4 traits of gifted children: fluency and flexibility.  [The 4 traits are: fluency, flexibility, elaboration & originality.] Despite developing this activity for GATE, I have used it very successfully with 1st graders in a heterogeneous classroom, and with 2nd - 5th grades in enrichment pull-out classes.  The results of this activity always amaze me.

Following is the assignment sheet that I send home, giving my students 1 week to complete it.  

I encourage my students to enlist the help of their families.  It creates a wonderful home-school connection, giving overly zealous parents a constructive focus for interacting with their gifted children.  (If you've ever taught G/T, you know what I'm talking about!) Projects like this are terrific for helping shy children speak before an audience. Similarly, it prompts children who have oral communication deficits to practice their communication skills.

When the children present their projects the following week, reward them with a participation certificate.

Sure, and you'll love this project.  You can find it in my TpT Store or my Teachers Notebook Shop.  Did I mention that it's FREE?

This product is part of a larger product, Destination Imagination.  

You can find Destination Imagination here or here.