Tuesday- Wednesday Week 4

Last week I asked all the children to bring something along today that made them think DISCOVERY. We had a great collection of items brought along and shared. I think one of the most interesting was Naomi Rose's Great Great Grandfather's box.We discussed firstly our thoughts as to what was in the box.....














Her Great Great Grandfather used to be a teacher....and this was his box (collection) of resources. Inside we found.......samples of seeds, wood, skulls, birds feet, precious stones, liquids and a note book/journal where he had written notes on the things he had collected!!!









His notebook was so interesting and the script just perfect! We discovered he loved and cared nature as everything within the box was natural (aside from the journal and a few tin boxes where items were stored)
Here are some of the items we brought that made us think DISCOVERY



















Why do you think these items made us think DISCOVERY??

For AFFECTIVE at the moment we are writing 'Like a' poems. poems that describe us and our feelings. we are also investigationg personality types. we are using the 4 Keirsey Temprements as a guide (http://keirsey.com) . We are reading to find out whether we are; Artisians, Guardians, Idealists or Rationals. From there we are going to see which famous people in our world we match personalities with. We are really excited about this!!! At the end, and just for fun, we are going to see which house we would be in at Hogwarts and which character we would best match on the story The Wizard of Oz........watch this space for more info (Tracey has left it school at the time of this composition!)


After language we began Talent Development.









Poets hard at work.......

We spent the first half hour on Talent Clubs. The readers/Writers club are doing a huge fact find on Shakespeare and the mathematicians are working on Mathsmate. After clubs we moved on to Exploring talent. What fun we had and what major diversity!! Some chose to continue on with their club work, but others are doing; model making, cartooning, creature creation, animation, science experiements........and more.

The afternoon was spent DISCOVERING all that we could about the day we were born....and the date, not necessarly the year. We had fun discovering which literary giants we share birthdays with and what movies were number 1!! We also enjoyed finding out about moon phases and what the moon was doing when we were born. Just for fun we discovered how to write our names in Viking Runes!!!

Tuesday - Wednesday Week 3

Welcome back to another year at ODC. I would also like to say a special 'hi' to all our new families.

Well, there's nothing quite like getting straight into it!! So, after a few 'getting to know' each other type games, we started to think about our hopes and goals for our year at ODC. For some of us this was quite easy (we have been here before) but for our newer students it really got them thinking because they weren't quite sure what exactly to expect at ODC.









Here are the GKP/ODC curriculum Goals for 2011

* Develop an understanding of myself as a gifted individual

* Explore and develop my gifts, talents and interests

* Engage in abstract and complex learning

* Experience and embrace new challenges

* Create and innovate

You will be seeing many exciting things happening in the classroom this year that will help us to achieve these goals.

To help achieve these goals the GKP Curriculum is broken in to 4 cornersstones;

Mental Edge, Affective, Concept and Talent Development. This morning we explored what the 4 cornerstones are, why we do them and what they may look like during an ODC day.

After morning tea, we asked the question "What is Talent Development and why is it so important?

We thought about it and responed using the thinking tool 'Community of Inquiry' We then did a bus stop rotation (rotate around after every 4 minute) to investigate Talent Development. We thought about;

* How do you know when you have a talent?

* What happens when people develop their talents?

* What happens when people don't develop their talents?

* What are the characteristics of people who work to develop their talents?

DISCOVERY

Discovery is our concept for 2011 and this afteroon we had fun discovering what it means to DISCOVER!!! (and have fun too!!!)

Again we were in rotational groups.

Here we are discovering....

The properties of OOBLECK

Oobleck is a non-Newtonian fluid. This basically means that it has the properties to be both a liquid and a solid. We had a lot of fun with it and it was very messy!!






Our 2nd station was to see what we could DISCOVER about the person who owned this bag by looking at it's contents and making assumptions. Each group came up with a completey character.





Our 3rd station was to discover where some common English language word derived from.

Here are some of what we found out;
LOOT - Hindi, CONFETTI - Italian, BERSERK - Old Norse, KHAKI - Urdu,


We also discovered a language called YIDDISH that none of us had heard of before!!


At the 4th station we had to DISCOVER how many palindromic 3 digit numbers there were (for some of us this meant finding out what a panindrome was first!) and see what other things we could discover about palindromes.

At our final station we had to DISCOVER how many words we could create from the word DISCOVERY. We had a little competition (us gifted kids LOVE competition!) The winner was Callum with 31, followed very closely behind by Taine!!





Our first week was throughly enjoyable and we can't wait until next week.