There has been a lot of research to support that students learn best when the work is relevant and interesting to them. This holds especially true to gifted students! This whole trimester, the students have guided their own learning and it has led to some really cool experiences, like visiting a food bank and meeting a city mayor. They have spearheaded their own community service project, with some students collecting donations from neighbors and friends! Today, the Sharks were so excited to recieve new food donations (mind you the food drive has not officially started) that we spent close to an hour sorting, counting, graphing and goal setting! My role is to facilitate their ideas and provide them with materials, and guide them through new skills, such as deciding how to show their data on the graph. I can work more closely with individual students during this time and cater to their strengths and weaknesses.
Watch the video below and look for how the students are interacting with each other. You'll see that everyone is doing a graph, talking about total quantity, sorting and classifying, one student offering help to another student, and one student explaining what has been collected. Enjoy!
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| TV is calculating the seperate categories to find the total number of donated food. |
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| Students graphing the sorted results of total food donated so far. |
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| Whoa! Check out all this food! |
