Primary Gifted and Talented

Colleen Elkins – Gifted and Talented Co-ordinator K-6

K-6 Gifted and Talented (G&T)Program

To reflect on the G&T program from K-6 for Term 1, I thought it might be helpful to do two things: a) collect some snippets and comments from the participants in G&T lessons (completely unscripted and reported below) and b) meet with teachers and G&T staff to review practices and summarise progress.

Firstly, from the students:

A scenario in Year 2 Mathematics whilst investigating metres, centimetres and millimetres.

Student 1: What about nanometres?

Student 2: What’s a nanometer?

Teacher: Let’s look it up.

Student 1: (gasping) it says there are 1 000 000 nanometres in a millimetre!

Where is my piece of paper? I am going to write this down, put it in my pocket

and keep it for my whole life!

Student 3: Can we see if there is something smaller than a nanometre? (giggle)

Year 4 Literature

Since I’ve been in Extension Reading I’ve been reading much thicker and longer books.

It is very interesting and I especially like learning about the ancient world!

Extension reading is such fun because a lot of stuff I think I know, I actually don’t, so I get to learn lots of things.

Year 1 Mathematics Lessons

We learn about stuff at a really hard level like Year 3 or Year 5. Sometimes we plus (add) really hard stuff. I like challenges.

It’s exciting because you don’t know what you’re going to do.

It’s my favourite subject because it’s really hard.

As a practitioner in the field one often hears the statement that: ‘A gifted child is gifted all of the time’. For this reason, it is our duty to cater for these students in as many areas of their school life as possible. To this end, planning meetings are used for the extensive sharing of expertise about the characteristics of gifted students and to ensure that the content level and design of curriculum will engage and challenge these students.

Meetings have occurred over the last two weeks to reflect and collaboratively plan for Term 2. It is delightful to see how excited teachers get about providing for their most capable students. We are lucky to have such inspired teachers at Emanuel School. G&T provisions will continue to take the form of either a withdrawal group or a small group working with a teacher in the classroom.

Below are a few interesting websites that you/your child may like to investigate.