1st Graders Are Rockin!

We had a fabulous day in gifted today! Our 15 first graders spent the day learning the routines and expectations for our class. We also spent some time getting to know all of our unique classmates when we completed and shared our "All About Me" page. We read a book called "If I Were a Noun" and played a noun guessing game. Ask your child to play it with you! "Line Designs" were made after discussing the art element of line and reviewing vertical, horizontal, and parallel lines. After asking the class what a scientist looked like I received answers like: "they have a white coat", "they have black shoes", "they have brown hair." The students were then told if they wanted to know what a scientist looked like they needed to look around them. We are all scientists! We are curious about the world around us, we have questions and we make guesses and we experiment all the time to find out how things work. The students took part in a little science lab discovering colors. Overall it was a great first day of gifted for the year! Thank you for sending your child to gifted prepared and for all of the generous donations of supplies I we recieved! Don't forget to send in your child's digital release form so that I can begin posting pictures next week!

2nd Grade Had a Musical Monday!

Our 2nd grade class is rockin and rollin! We welcomed a new student, Sameh, to our class and we had a great day being back in class with all of our friends. We started the day with a "Waker Upper" to stretch our minds and get us thinking. "Our Symphony" was next and we spent some time going over expectations for the class and also ways to earn points and agreed on things we would work towards. We also spent some time getting to know our fellow musicians as we completed our picture page for our gifted folder filled with all of our favorite things. Using our flexible thinking and creativity we also wrote acrostic poems using only adjectives to describe ourselves. "Mad Science" time was spent talking about the scientific method and putting the steps in order. We used our keen observation skills to describe sharks teeth and had to remember which one we observed when they were all mixed up. I know we are going to have an amazing year in gifted! Thank you for all of the generous donations of supplies! Don't forget to send your child's digital release form back to me so I can start posting pictures next week.

Singing Our Way Into a New Year!

I am all jazzed up and ready to rock and roll into a new year in gifted!! Be sure to stop by the room on Orientation Day. I would love to see you and I need you to help me with our outside bulliten board.
Gifted will begin on Monday, August 31st!
Gifted Days for this year:
Monday- 2nd
Tuesday K/1
Please bring a regular composition book and an art shirt(this does not have to be new)! Our lunch is a little later than it was last year so be sure to bring a snack! I can't wait to see you!

Bubbles!

Bubbles, bubbles everywhere! Today was filled with bubbles! Through our scientific play with bubbles we learned that adding soap to water weakens the pull of the surface tension and makes the surface of the water much stretchier. It spreads out enough for you to blow air inside-it's a bit like blowing up balloons. A bubble will burst when it's film gets so thin it can no longer contain the air inside. The colors we see depend on the thickness of the bubble's skin. Blue-green is the thickest, followed by blue(thinner), magenta(even thinner), and yellow-white(very thin). When the film appears black(or transparent), it is at it's very thinnest and is about to pop. You can guess the longevity of a bubble by observing its color. At that point, the bubble will be one millionth of an inch thick. We observed bubbles, measured bubbles, compared bubble solutions, made bubble blowers, and had lots of bubbly fun!!

Creativity

A large part of what we do has to do with being critical and creative thinkers. We focus on the characteristics of different types of critical and creative thinking: fluency, flexibility, elaboration, originality, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, risk taking, complexity, curiosity, and imagination. Today we focused on three of these characteristics: Flexibility results in many different kinds of ideas. The purpose of flexible thinking is to generate and promote responses that deviate from normal thought patterns. Elaboration is the creative thinking behavior that results in adding to or embellishing an idea. It is the ability to add details, fill in the gaps, build a group of related ideas and expand ideas. Originality is the creative thinking behavior that produces new or novel responses. Originality is often the by product of other creative thinking behavior. Most of all today we discussed how creativity can simply mean looking at the ordinary and seeing the extraordinary.