Ask your students to write about their summer breaks, but remix their activities into a new genre or setting. Perhaps they vacationed at Hogwarts, Mordor, or Tatooine? Not interested in a writing assignment?
Content Area: Language Arts
Analyzing Suffixes Inductively
The year opens with a vocabulary skill analyzing “Suffixes: -ful, -less, -ly.” I adjusted this lesson to examine how these suffixes change the part of speech of words, rather than the meaning.
The Tragedy of the Commons
Imagine that we all share a common resource, but no one is really in charge. How do we maintain order without an authority? This is a fantastically fuzzy situation for students to dig into.
Ask Creative Questions
Is this the message I want to give to my gifted students? “Follow the directions?” This is a room full of students who are creative, flexible, divergent thinkers. These are the future Noble Laureates, inventors, and revolutionaries. Let’s allow them (or better yet: force them) to exercise their creative muscles.
Think Like An Anthropologist to Make Inferences
Like all HM comprehension skills, “Making Inferences” appears yearly beginning in kindergarten, so I know my 6th graders have practiced, and may well have mastered, the skill. To differentiate, I turned to the model of “Thinking Like a Disciplinarian.”
Is Your Writing Process This Fun?
Teaching our students to prewrite, write, and rewrite is a difficult process. Much like getting students to show their work in math, process writing is a challenge for gifted students who work intuitively and are annoyed by artificial processes. What better motivation is there than the chance to point out someone else’s errors AND be rewarded for it?
Exploring Morality Behind Actions
No one can deny that our gifted students have great power. They may be intellectual powerhouses, grasping concepts years ahead of peers. They may be emotionally sensitive, becoming aware of issues such as mortality at an early age. They may be leaders of people, showing leadership qualities from the very beginning. How do we teach them to use this power?
Content Imperatives And Conflict
Conflict is an essential tool for analyzing literature, understanding history, and improving as a writer. Each year, my 6th graders discuss the types of conflict commonly found in stories and analyze writing using the content imperatives.
Taking “Noting Details” To A Higher Level
By 6th grade, our reading program’s comprehension skills have become a bit basic for most of my gifted students. I’ve been working on increasing the depth and complexity of these skills. In this case, “Noting Details” has become “Explicit Vs. Implicit Details.”
All About Character Archetypes
Another example of “structure that increases creativity” is character archetypes. An archetype, according to Wikipedia, is “an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated.” Let’s use an inductive lesson to teach our students about these literary tools.