September

I have had a wonderful time getting to know everyone and seeing some familiar faces after a fun summer! We have kicked off the year firstly learning about why we are here and our rights as a gifted learners. Students spent time looking at what brain science tells us and that mistakes are an important part of the learning process. I hope they find our classroom a safe place to explore, take risks, and grow this school year!

Exploration: Speaking of exploring they enjoyed the escape game that we used to introduce Exploration as our year-long theme. They practiced collaboration in order to searched the classroom and discover clues leading us to the "Key to Success" this year in ALERT. Student groups (with help from our consultants) solved codes and puzzles highlighting some of the things they will experience in our classroom through the course of the year. They managed to beat the clock and uncover the hidden key: Curiosity! We have also spent time developing concept generalizations for exploration and looked at archaeologists as explorers of the past. Students used the skills of archaeologists to excavate and document their finds in our edible dig site!

Critical Thinking: We used videos from the Children's Guide to Critical Thinking to introduce the traits of critical thinkers. We also met the three types of thinkers, Selfish Sam, Naive Nancy, and Fair-minded Fran. Using these characters as a conversation starter, we began to look at the importance of being a critical thinker and ways to practice and improve our thinking skills.

Creative Thinking: Students have gotten familiar with our mascots of creativity, the Nerds! We use these particular mascots because no two are alike, they are colorful, fruity, and fun- just like creative thinking! Students explored their creative sides by discussing and demonstrating the four keys to creative thinking. We began by taking a simple figure, looking at it from various perspectives (flexible thinking), brainstorming what it could become (fluency of ideas), choosing the idea like no one else's (originality), and filling in the details of our picture (elaboration)! These creative pieces became the covers of our ALERT binders reminding us to "think outside the box"!

Habits of Mind: Art Costa's Habits of Mind represent 16 traits that successful people can use when faced with a problem. Throughout the year, we will be focusing on building these individual traits in students. As an introduction, students looked at the habits collectively and became familiar with them by playing our Habits of Mind bingo game.

Morphic Thinking: We kicked off our Morphic Thinking morning routine where students warm-up with a spontaneous problem and boundary breaker. We will be including these weekly. A spontaneous problem is a brainstorming problem to be solved in a specific amount of time and scored according to the number and creativity of responses generated. The point is to challenge students to be flexible thinkers, to elaborate on original ideas and to think fluently and creatively about a specific topic. A boundary breaker is a group experience that works toward creating a sense of community. Students gain an awareness of and respect for the opinion of others by the use of questions that go beyond superficial depth and have no right/wrong answers.

M^3 (Mentoring Mathematical Minds) Unraveling the Mystery of the Moli Stone: We have introduced our math curriculum by studying the mysterious Moli Stone artifact. In this unit, student will focus on numeration and gain knowledge of different number systems. Using this knowledge, they will help archaeologists uncover the meaning of the mysterious markings on the stone. We have also spent time preparing for our math time together by outlining both the rights and obligations as mathematicians as this curriculum focuses heavily on discussion, defense of one's thinking, and writing about concepts. Students finished showing their prior knowledge on the pre-assessment and we are ready to embark!