Gifted Education Books

Since one of the hats I wear is the one of content manager for the Kendall Hunt Publishing website, I always have the scoop on our latest and greatest. And if you haven’t checked out our language arts curriculum for high ability learners since, oh, yesterday, you’ll want to check it out now! 

I think I’ve spoken here about the fact that we’re in the process of rolling out a new edition of all the materials for the Center for Gifted Education’s Language Arts program. Well, it’s coming in fast and furiously now. Just yesterday and today I loaded covers and descriptions for all the outstanding trade books that the new edition features. Such books as Amelia Bedelia for the younger set, Chasing Vermeer (a book my son has read and LOVED) for the little bit older ones, and Huck Finn for those in search of a classic.

There are books for gifted students at every level from Grade 1 through Grade 12. I think I counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 54 new trade books that I added, with about another 15-20 yet to come. The new student and teacher guides are rolling out as well, with new ones popping up every couple of weeks. Check it out when you get a chance!

In my last post I introduced you to the amazing work the Second and Seven Foundation is doing to promote literacy. We usually talk about high school chemistry textbooks and gifted education books here, but none of that matters if students lack basic literacy skills. That's why 2nd and 7 is Tackling Illiteracy.

Throughout each school year, 2nd and 7 visits schools and gives books to second grade students. In the 2008-2009 school year alone they provided their books to approximately 4,000 students in 53 schools in Central Ohio, as well as nearly 12,000 more children across the country. That's 16,000 second graders who received a brand new book of their own from 2nd and 7!

And it's not just any books they're giving out. 2nd and 7 has developed a series of age appropriate books for second graders. Right now the Foundation has three books available: The Hog Mollies and The Pickle Pie Party, The Hog Mollies and The Rocky Relay Race, and The Hog Mollies and the Zooming Zackle Zoit. Each book focuses on a new adventure of the Hog Mollies, Hoppy, Sprout, Harley and Duke, fun little characters that work together as a team to tackle challenges that they face. With humor, engaging storylines and beautiful, full color illustrations, children are drawn right into the story, never even realizing that they are improving their literacy skills with each word. Each of the three books is available in paperback or hard cover from Kendall Hunt Publishing. Click here to go to Kendall Hunt's Hog Mollies page and order yours today! All proceeds benefit the 2nd and 7 Foundation's efforts in Tackling Illiteracy. Once you see these books for yourself, you'll want to get one for every child in your life!

Don't forget to visit 2nd and 7's website and see how you can support their efforts!

You can also follow 2nd and 7 on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/2nd-7-Foundation/105340035060.
 

As a follow-up to the fun and learning Kendall Hunt Publishing employees were a part of on the inaugural National Lab Day, there’s something I really want to get off my chest. Yes, Kendall Hunt is an educational publishing company, we sell educational materials and solutions. Books for gifted students, high school chemistry textbooks, teacher edition textbooks, online learning solutions, and more…we make it, and yep, we want to sell it.

But as I saw my fellow employees participate in and react to their National Lab Day experiences, it made me feel really good. Because for us, it really is about the kids. It’s about them learning, and growing, and, eventually, making the world a better place. And we know we can influence that, we can help them along the way, we can make a difference for them. We’ll never be a giant monolithic publisher who sells more high school biology books that everyone else combined. But we don’t want to be that. We want to help teachers, real classroom teachers, from kindergarten through college, find the best solution for their students.

I think it’s just that we care about the kids, we believe in what we do, and we hope to make a difference. It’s what keeps each of us going every day. As loyal readers, I just thought you might like to know what drives us.

Getting Ready -- Prepares individuals for the teacher job search by making the most of the student teaching experience.  It includes insider advise on multiple topics, 100 things employers will ask about you, and maintaining a professional web presence.

Getting There -- Teaches the essential tools of the teacher job search including résumés, cover letters, interview portfolios, and tips on where to find jobs.

Getting Hired -- Provides strategic interview responses, knowledge of various interview settings, common interview questions and sure-fire tips to make you stand out above the rest with a knock'em dead interview.

Each book comes with individual access to the Getting Hired Companion Website, which contains a plethora of resources, including: ePlanner Activities: Templates for résumé/letter writing, philosophy statements, common interview questions and topics, and success planning.

Interview Portfolio: Build an Interview Portfolio that can easily become an ePortfolio showcasing standards-based teaching abilities, as well as a tremendous interview preparation tool. The 10 Interview Portfolio templates comprise a powerful self-promotion and interview success tool.

Videos: Watch sample interviews for all levels of instruction, listen in as employers give job seeking advice, and key interview questions and topics.

This book can be used for student teaching courses through college or universities, or to support a job search for an individual in the education field. So if you can't decide what to get your son or daughter who is beginning their student teaching, the student who has helped you create lesson plans for your gifted and talented students for the past three months, or the friend who will be student teaching in the Fall, check out Getting Hired on the Kendall Hunt Publishing website: http://www.kendallhunt.com/gettinghired. 

Will you be at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Conference beginning tomorrow in San Diego? If so, first, I’m jealous, I love San Diego, but second and more importantly, don’t forget to visit Kendall Hunt Publishing at Booth #523. You’ll be able to check out all of our gifted education books and accelerated learning resources, including Project M3: Mentoring Mathematical Minds, and the brand new Project M2: Mentoring Young Mathematicians.

Project M3 is a math curriculum for high ability learners in grades 3-5, while Project M2 meets needs of gifted math students from Kindergarten through Grade 2.

The following workshops by our authors, will take place during the conference:

Math Innovations, presented by Kathy Gavin, Friday, April 23rd, 10:00a-11:00a, Room 1B in the San Diego Convention Center.

We Discover Math, P-K, presented by Carol Inzerillo, Friday, April 23rd, 11:30a-12:30p, Room 1B in the Sand Diego Convention Center.

Math Innovations, presented by Kathy Gavin, Friday, April 23rd, 1:00p-2:00p, Room 1B in the San Diego Convention Center.

M3 and M2, presented by Kathy Gavin, Friday, April 23rd, 2:30p-3:30p, Room 1B in the San Diego Convention Center.

After the conference, I’d love it if you’d leave a comment and let me know what you think!

A colleague found a great article from Teacher Magazine dispelling myths about gifted students and gifted education. You can find it here: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/unwrapping_the_gifted/. It includes a link to a video that shows students tackling some of the myths discussed in the article.

Particularly interesting amongst the myths are “Gifted education requires abundant resources,” and “Gifted students don’t need help; they’ll do fine on their own.” Any of you out there who are charged with creating lesson plans for gifted and talented students, and who don’t have the resources to purchase a curriculum for high ability learners know that it’s possible to create a gifted program on a shoestring budget if you have no other choice. And as to that other myth about gifted students not needing help, as the parent of a gifted child I know that sometimes they need more help simply because more is expected of them and less help is provided because some people assume they don’t need it.

It thought today I’d talk about inquiry based science AND gifted science – two birds, one stone, if you will. Continuing with the discussion of the curriculum for high ability learners available from Kendall Hunt Publishing and the Center for Gifted Education (CFGE) at The College of William & Mary, there’s also an inquiry based science program available. It has seven problem-based units on such topics as coastal erosion, natural and cultural systems, electricity, nuclear energy, and animal populations. With units for grades 1 through 8, it supports all levels with challenging, hands-on scientific issues.

For instance, in  Where’s the Beach? plans for building a children's camp at the beach are on hold because the town council is worried about beach erosion. Since the camp received a large donation to develop nature-themed experiences designed to teach children how to protect the environment, the camp manager wants to cooperate with the council. The problem is that she must begin construction quickly to be ready for the summer season. Acting as members of the town council, the students must develop scientifically-based regulations that will satisfy the long-term needs of the town and the plans for the new camp.

How great is that? It puts students in a real life situation that they can imagine affecting their lives and helps them use scientific concepts to find solutions. These are no ordinary books for gifted students…
 

…let’s talk about Language Arts. In my last post I highlighted the Social Studies program from the Center for Gifted Education (CFGE) at The College of William & Mary that we at Kendall Hunt Publishing offer. I thought I’d feature another of CFGE’s programs today…their Language Arts Curriculum for High Ability Learners.

This CFGE program includes modules for grades 1-11, nice because it keeps the learning consistent for students all the way through. Among others, it includes these topics: 

• Journeys & Destinations
• Autobiographies
• Persuasion
• The 1940s: A Decade of Change
• Threads of Change in 19^th Century American Literature

Each module includes implementation support, unit vocabulary lists, a glossary of literary terms, and bibliographies of student reading and teacher resources. After reading the literary selections, students engage in literary response and persuasive writing activities. Grammar, vocabulary, reasoning and research are also embedded in the unit activities. It’s so much more than just gifted education books.

One Virginia teacher has been using this curriculum for high ability learners for two years, and emailed us to tell us that, “the units are absolutely wonderful.”

You can find the program, along with samples from each module on the Kendall Hunt Publishing website: http://www.kendallhunt.com/index.cfm?PID=219&PGI=249.

Tell me what you think!

At home the other night we were hard at work on a Social Studies project when I got to thinking about social studies resources for gifted students. I know that these materials can be hard to find and many teachers create their own gifted and talented lesson plans.

But there’s a great social studies curriculum for high ability learners: the Center for Gifted Education (CFGE) at The College of William & Mary. Have you checked it out? You can find it here on the Kendall Hunt Publishing website: http://www.kendallhunt.com/index.cfm?PID=219&PGI=251.

CFGE Social Studies offers great topics, including these, just to name a few:

• Gift of the Nile
• Ancient China
• The Civil War: It’s Causes and Effects
• The Road to the White House: Electing the American President
• Defining Nations: Cultural Identity and Political Tensions

And the program meets the needs of Grades 2 through 12. It even includes implementation support such as guidelines, learning centers and teaching models, along with additional resources. Where else can you find this? As the world gets smaller and smaller, it seems to me at least that our kids really need to learn about these things. Many gifted education books offer science and reading programs, but it seems social studies is a little harder to find.
Do your schools have talented and gifted resources for social studies? Tell me what you’re using and how you use them, I’d be really interested to know.
 

My son was recently invited to participate in an area Eco-Meet. They chose three fourth grade gifted students and two fifth grade students from each of the participating districts to make up that district’s team. This is quite the inquiry based science event, it seems! Each team member received a packet about an inch thick of materials they need to study to prepare. Additionally, they will be working with the gifted and talented teacher, who is the coach, each week leading up to the event in mid-May.

The Eco-Meet is a day long event held at a local park high above the Mississippi River. The park rangers and Army Corps of Engineers will involve the students in activities and presentations on different subjects, including Fish of the Mississippi. After each event, the teams will take a test. The tests will be graded and winners announced.

Your erstwhile blogger has returned from the land of vacationers, fully refreshed and ready to blog. I don’t know if it was the time of year, or what, but while I was off I started wondering about the question in the headline of this post. How did we end up with “talented & gifted” resources, gifted education books, accelerated learning resources? Where did the terms come from?

So out of curiosity, I did a little research while I was off. It turns out there’s no general consensus as to the origin of the term “gifted.” And, in fact, as we’ve all known for years, there is quite a bit of controversy surrounding the use of the term. But that wasn’t the interesting part. Along the way I learned that what we call gifted education and curriculum for accelerated learners, etc. has been around, literally, for thousands of years. In the sixth and seventh centuries, under China’s Tang Dynasty, children identified as prodigies were summoned to the imperial court for advanced education. Also, Plato was a leading advocate of specialized education for those who were intellectually gifted.

Now, I knew that the Marland Report, A Nation at Risk, and the Jacob Javits Act more recently had memorable impacts on talented and gifted education, but I certainly had no idea how far back the origins went. See what happens when I have extra time on my hands!

Have you visited our Professional Development area? KH offers professional development support for many of our programs, including our accelerated learning resources. Here’s some news on a recent conference from our Professional Development Manager, Laura Lottes:

The Talented and Gifted Professional Development Conference held in Columbia, South Carolina November 18^th and 19^th was a big success! 

The conference was designed to provide training to both users and non-users of Kendall Hunt talented and gifted resources and curricula for high ability learners.  Eighty-six teachers from 29 elementary schools and administrators from the South Carolina Department of Education participated in the two-day event.  The participants had four topics to choose from including Math, Science, Language Arts and Social Studies.  Our author groups from Project M3 and the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William & Mary provided us with the resources for content of the workshops.

We are so grateful to our dedicated customers, as well as our future customers, who believe in life long learning and continuing education for their staff!

So, we learned today that our Middle School Life Science program, which is just out in its new edition, has won the Peoples Choice Award at the Chicago Book Clinic and Media Show! It's a given that we all think our inquiry based science programs, ranging from primary school textbooks to high school science textbooks are great, but this award confirms it because the award is given by publishing professionals.

The Chicago Book Clinic, founded in 1936, encourages excellence in publishing by providing a platform for educational, social & professional interaction of its members. Its members are professionals in book and media publishing, printing, editorial, design, and all business aspects of the industry.

Middle School Life Science meets the needs of all students better than most science programs because it is designed around the learning cycle--that is, concepts are introduced with hands-on experiences and then developed through discussions, mini-lectures, and/or readings. This approach provides the concrete experiences that are so important for students with learning disabilities while also providing the solid science experiences that can motivate gifted students.
 

Here’s my question…as a teacher, what do your gifted students do during RTI time? It used to be that the students who struggled or had behavioral issues were the ones who “fell through the cracks.” More and more I feel like it’s now the gifted or advanced students who fall through. Of course, in a perfect world, no one would fall through the cracks. And I give all the credit in the world to the classroom teacher who is trying to balance the needs of 20-30 students with vastly differing needs, levels and abilities. 

I know that in my son’s school, everyday they have a half hour of RTI time. During this time, the other students are engaged in group reading. For some students, that group reading is beneficial, for the more advanced students, they are bored. As I’ve indicated here before, his school doesn’t have a lot of accelerated learning resources or books for gifted students - they don’t even have a curriculum for high ability learners. And they only go to their gifted class twice a week. So what’s the answer for these students?

I did give the principal one suggestion when I spoke with him earlier today (first time in five years that I’ve actually felt the need to call him, and I didn’t want to just call and complain without offering at least one solution). I said the teacher create a couple groups of the other students, give them a research topic or question, and tell them that they must make a presentation, complete with visual aids, in two weeks. It would at least put that RTI time to good use for them.

 I’d love to hear from teachers who have this same dilemma. I know many schools don’t have gifted education books in class, and some lack even the basic talented and gifted resources. So what do you do?

They’re here, they’re here!! The 2009-2010 PreK-12 catalogs are now available on our website! Chock full of high school science textbooks, primary school textbooks, accelerated learning resources, and much, much more. 

There are two catalogs, available via pdf download: the first showcases our outstanding elementary school textbooks for grades PreK through 8^th grade. The second catalog covers our offerings of high school science textbooks and programs, math, health & fitness, and talented and gifted resources. Best of all, you can be green and still see the catalogs if you just download them here: http://www.kendallhunt.com/index.cfm?PID=5970&PGI=0.  From this page you can also download our Reading Resources and Gifted Education catalogs. Check them out!

I know that this blog is generally about the topics of gifted education books and inquiry based science, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that we also have a great depth of resources in the reading area. Our new Reading Resources catalog is now available and offers many products to improve reading, for intervention, for assessment & reading inventory, etc. 

Jerry Johns, a renowned expert in the reading field, has been a Kendall Hunt Publishing author for many years. His Basic Reading Inventory is used nationwide and Canada. Check out the catalog when you have a chance!