Before the Break

Here are a few things we did... This Week In Gifted!

Treasure Directions

Many of the classes have been creating old looking treasure maps.  Now they are working on coming up with directions to go along with those maps.  The Summerland ASPIRE class looked at some examples of real life treasure clues; the Beale Papers and the poem with clues to the whereabouts of the Forest Fenn Treasure.  The Beale Papers are a series of three cipher texts supposedly leading to a vault of silver and gold.  The Fenn Treasure is a bronze chest containing gold, silver and jewels.

As mentioned last week, some of the students are creating their own ciphers or using ciphers they are familiar with to encipher their directions.  Others are writing rhymes or riddles and still others are using the tools on The Crypto Club website to encipher their messages.  Some are even trying the challenging Affine Cipher!

Around the World

Almost all of the classes played Around the World as a warm-up game this week.  Students sit in a circle and one person starts off by giving the name of a geographic location on Earth.  The next person has to come up with the name of a new geographic location that begins with the last letter of the word just given.  For example if the first name given is Penticton, the next name has to begin with an 'N'.  Each group quickly found out that a lot of places end in the letter 'A' and that you soon run out of 'A' names!

More Project Presentations

The Penticton Grade 4s and 5s heard presentations from:

• Jamie on 'The Eye of Horus' (info page and plasticine model)
• Isaac with a poster on the California Gold Rush
• Tessa who made a newspaper with a number of treasure related articles
• Joycey with a mini movie on types of gold and diamond objects in Minecraft

Some students who have presented their projects already, explored using the visual programming software Scratch to create maze games.

These are just a few of the things that we did this week.  Thanks for checking in!  I hope that the students and their families have an enjoyable Spring Break.  Gifted Program classes resume again the first week back after the break (the week of March 30th).