Flags, Improv Bingo, and Brainstorming Online

Here are some of the things we did... This Week In Gifted!

Explaining Our Flag Designs

Last week the Penticton grade 1 / 2 class presented their flags to their peers.  They created their flags to represent real or imagined places.  Below is a video (link) with photos of the flags and the voices of the students as they explained their choice of colours and symbols in their designs.  Two students were absent and so their flags have no explanations yet.

Improv Bingo

The Summerland ASPIRE and AIM classes as well as the Penticton grade 5s played Improv Bingo.  In this fun drama activity students are given a character, goal, obstacle, place and object.  They then have a limited amount of time to create a short skit involving each of the elements, which are usually pretty wacky.  This week students worked in groups of 2, 3 or 4.  Successful groups had members who were very open to ideas, were inclusive and were also willing to compromise.  Prior to creating our skits we talked about the challenges of this type of activity and strategies for success.  The students came up with creative and very humorous skits.  It is amazing how the same starting elements can result in such vastly different skits!

Brainstorming Radio Show Names Online

This week it was the Penticton grade 3 / 4 groups whose turn it was to brainstorm a name for the radio show which will contain all of the mini radio shows that students are creating.  One of the grade 4s has been asking for a chance to use padlet again, and this seemed like a good opportunity to give it another whirl.  Padlet is a site we tried last year that allows you to post notes on a virtual wall.  I created multiple 'walls' and assigned 2 - 4 students per wall.  They did a wonderful job of brainstorming!  The neat thing about padlet is that everyone on the same 'wall' can add their ideas at the same time and also see the ideas of the other group members.  It is much more democratic and participatory than the traditional group brainstorm where one person in the group controls the paper and pen, and often only the louder/more dominant people in the group are heard.

Once students had brainstormed a list of names, they each submitted their favourite name for the class to vote on.  The top two names from each class will be put forward for all students to vote on.  Here is the link to the list the Tuesday morning class generated and voted upon.  The final vote for all students happens next week!

The Wrap Up

Thanks for checking in and seeing some of the things we did this week.  If you have a child in the program they can hopefully add to what is highlighted here and fill you in on some of the things I didn't mention.