Monday 22 October 2012

Week 1: Getting to Know Each Other

Week 1 (Oct 9th - 11th) in Gifted was all about getting to know each other.

Some of the things we did this week:
  • Name Game: "My name is ______ and I like to ______"
    • a fun and very active way to get to learn everyone's name
    • knowing the names of the people in our class is the first step to creating a strong learning community
  • Classroom Agreements: we went over these together and students helped to describe and demonstrate each one
    • Attentive Listening
    • Appreciations; No Put Downs
    • The Right To Pass
    • Mutual Respect
  • Discussion of This Year's Theme
    • classes brainstormed the types of activities they would like to do this year as we explore the theme Invention
  • Improv Bingo
    • each class generated a wacky scenario and then in groups of 3 or 4 acted them out
    • this activity allows students to have fun and to be creative 
    • it hits on a number of our goals in the gifted program: creative thinking, divergent thinking and presentation skills
    • the activity can be quite challenging because students have a limited amount of time to come up with their skit; often group members each have differing ideas and must come to some sort of agreement
    • at the end of the skits we discussed what we thought each group did well 
The morning classes also did 'You in 3D'.  Students thought of an activity that they did that gave them the feeling of flow.  They then chose an object to represent that activity and either drew it or created it out of play dough.  Below are photos of some of the student creations.



So that's the Coles' Notes version of the first week of classes.  I'm really enjoying getting to know the students and I hope that they are enjoying the class too!

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