Help with activities!

[Diane Brown]

In our Grade 4/5/6 of 23 students of extremely variable abilities, we have a gifted student. He is 10 and we are looking for some activites we can set him to, preferably on computer as all students have netbooks, when he needs extending. Looking at Math and Literacy activites. If anyone can give me any help or ideas it would be much appreciated.
Thanks, Diane

[Kevin_K]

Scratch programming from scratch.mit.edu could be good, if scratch can be downloaded to the netbook.

Maybe also http://www.aimsedu.org/Puzzle/

Check out more pointers at http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/abe/math_education.html

[Diane Brown]

Thanks, Kevin, will check them out

[Nancy Bosch]

Diane, I have a website that might help. It's in the midst of an overhaul so things are jumbled together (like a garage sale) but he might find some activities of interest. The key is to make sure he is given different work not MORE work so he should be able to work on different projects after he has mastered the grade level material. He can show mastery in a number of ways, pretesting being the easiest. He gets his grade from the grade level work and the differentiated work is of his choosing...let me know if you want to discuss that in more depth.

[Parent]

He might enjoy reading, playing and writing "Interactive Fiction." Google for some links. He can download an Interactive Fiction program that will allow him to write his own "adventures" which would be fun for the other kids to play. These are not just "choose your adventure" stories where you choose one of three choices to go to the next chapter, these are fully interactive environments created by the student. The only downside is this generation expects computers to be like video games, and Interactive Fiction is all text like reading a book.

Here are some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Fiction_Competition

The best tool set for building his own Interactive Fiction is probably Inform7: http://inform7.com/

Be sure to review the examples before letting him try them. There are many, but a few of them have mature themes that wouldn't be appropriate for children.

[Diane Brown]

Thanks everyone for some great ideas and links. Onr of our main problems with this student is that he will not finish any work so we really have no evidence that he has mastered the basic concepts being taught. He says he already knows how to do the task so doesn't need to finish the worksheet. We are more than happy to extend him but need to know that he does know what we are teaching. This can be for Maths worksheets (2 levels above his age group, so not too easy) or Spelling worksheets which other students finish in 20 minutes (so not too time consuming). We are at our wit's end as to how to prove his mastery of grade level material. Any ideas?
Thanks, Diane

[Susan Goodkin]

Hi,

On the assessing mastery question, are there tests at the end of the chapters in the textbook you're using? Taking them could give you a good idea of how much of the material he's mastered.

I also recommend a book by Susan Assouline called, "Developing Math Talent," which is an excellent step-by-step guide for educating gifted math students.

If you'd like more resources that might interest your student, you can check out an article I wrote
at http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2009/apr/14/math-oppor
tunities-add-up-for-talented-students/. The article is directed to parents, but it works for teachers as well.

Good luck, and thank you for caring so much about your gifted student!

Susan

[Judy Twetten]

I'm glad I read the replies to your post. I got some great new information for my job (K-6 gifted in 4 schools). I heartily agree with the Scratch recommendations. There are also more free downloads I've found and explored on my webpage under Parent Resources
http://www.howard-winn.k12.ia.us/elemtag/K_8_GAT/Welcome.html

Nancy Bosch's web page, A Different Place http://www.adifferentplace.org/, is one of the most useful pages I use. Since I joined Gifted Ed 2.0 and Classroom 2.0 I've read some of Nancy's posts and discovered new parts of her web page. Last summer I also discovered some very useful ideas on Mrs. Ruth Sunda's gifted page from Chandler, Arizona.
http://www.kyrene.org/schools/brisas/sunda.htm Teaching is great! So many people want to share!