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.