Gorillas and Airplanes

After two weeks off for Spring Break we were back at it; here are a few of the things we did... This Week In Gifted!

Investigative & Eye-Witness Skills

Students were partnered up with someone in the class who they didn't know too well.  Their job was to find out three things their partner did over Spring Break and report back to the class.  The students did a great job of listening and remembering.  Then came the hard part!  They were told to sit back to back with their partner and imagine the following scenario; they were just in the bank and their partner (who they had never seen before) ran in and robbed the bank.  Their job was to write out a physical description of the bank robber to help the police in apprehending the suspect.  We quickly learned that even though we just spent 5 or 10 minutes in one-on-one conversations with the 'bank robber', it was hard to remember what they looked like!  What color was their t-shirt?  How about their eyes?  Were they wearing jeans or tights or track pants or ...  Once their physical description was written, everyone folded the piece of paper into an airplane and we launched them.  The next step was to retrieve a plane and try to match up the physical description on it with the correct person.  Eventually all of the robbers were nabbed!

This activity led to a discussion of eye-witness accounts and selective attention.  To illustrate the point we watched the following short video (link).

Projects, Projects, Projects!

Yes, we are still working on projects.  Some students presented prior to Spring Break and are working on interesting side-projects, and many more are almost done.  This week Charlotte and Shaylene kicked off presentations in the Penticton grade 2-3 group.  After each presentation the presenter's peers and I ask questions (either about the topic or about the format they used), and comment on what the presenter did well.  Through this all of the students are developing their listening and critical thinking skills; we all benefit when we talk about what a person did well in their project.  The presenters also feel good having the strong points in their work recognized by their peers as well as by their teacher.  Looking forward to more presentations next week!

As always--thanks for checking in to see what we've been doing!