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.
Wow, talk about accelerated learning resources! I can’t imagine how much these kids will learn by the time this is all done. And it doesn’t come straight out of an elementary school science textbook or gifted education books…they’re doing and learning. I’ll keep you posted on how it all goes. In the meantime, do your schools do anything like this? I’d love to hear about similar ideas that are happening out there!
Did you know that 99% of private school students graduate?
And of them, 90% attend 4-year colleges?
With statistics like that, it is vital private schools meet the needs of their students by providing curriculum for all students including high ability learners. Creating lesson plans for gifted and talented is never an easy when you are first meeting the needs of main stream students.
Kendall Hunt is one of the leading publishers in talented and gifted resources for mathematics, science, social studies and language arts. To learn more about the following programs, click on the links below...I know these will help nurture intellectual growth, challenge students and help prepare them for success at the next level.
Project M3: Mentoring Mathematical MindsThe Center for Gifted Education from The College of William & Mary
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 18th and 19th 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!
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?
I got to wondering this week, is creating lesson plans based on books for gifted students different than planning for a regular class? What brought this to mind was a discussion with my fourth grader about the work teachers must put into their jobs beyond the classroom. We talked about grading papers, creating parent newsletters, where tests based on, say, elementary school science textbooks come from, and lesson plans.
This then led to a discussion of what lesson plans are and how they come to be. I explained that many primary school textbooks offer guidance in this area, but he wondered how his gifted teacher (note to self: review sentence structure rules...while I feel all his teachers are gifted, I'm referring to the one who teaches the gifted classes) does it when they don't have gifted education books or a curriculum for high ability learners in his school. :-( I told him I was sure she probably uses the Internet for ideas and planning, but I thought I'd ask you all...those of you who do it without a "program" - how do you create your lesson plans for gifted and talented classes? I'd love to know!
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 8th 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!
School started today for my 4th grader. Last night we went to "Back to School Night" so he could meet the teacher, take his supplies and start to get settled in. First thing I went for, being in the science textbook publishing business, was the elementary school science textbook sitting on his desk. Felt like a brand new one too. Love those new books!
Then we stopped by the GATE room where the teacher showed me some of the new accelerated learning resources that she was able to purchase with some stimulus funds, including a few Kendall Hunt items from our
Project M3 program, a math curriculum for high ability learners. She also found some new lesson plans for gifted and talented classes that she's going to try out this year.
Project M3 has some great modules, like "At the Mall with Algebra" that let students use real life experience to learn math. They're not just gifted education books, they're gifted education adventures.
When looking for talented and gifted resources, it is important to meet the needs of all of your TAG math students. The following article by
M. Katherine Gavin, Ph.D. from Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, Univeristy of CT,
really embraces the issues to consider regarding books for gifted learners. http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/projectm3/meeting%20the%20needs.html
Kendall Hunt Publishing Company (KH) is an educational publishing company with three divisions: Pre-K-12, higher education and Kendall Hunt Professional.
I work in the Pre-K-12 Division. We produce programs for pre-kindergarten as well as textbooks for elementary school, middle school and high school. We work in various disciplines, but concentrate mainly on mathematics, science, gifted education books and custom publishing. We also develop various ancillary materials to go with our textbooks to create solution-based programs.
For this series of discussions, I'll concentrate specifically on the development of a high school science textbook.
Acquisition and Publishing Plan
The initial step for the education textbook publisher is the acquisition of a new product. This would include discussions between the author or curriculum developer and the publishing acquisition editor to determine whether or not it is feasible to go forward with new product. This would include discussions on the physical specifications of the book (size, number of colors, number of pages, etc.) and number of ancillary components (teacher edition textbook, test generator, website, and so on). At KH, the acquisitions editor would work with a project manager to determine a budget. We would also work with marketing and sales personnel to develop a publishing plan. The publishing plan may include review stages and/or field testing. The project manager would also create a schedule for the program.
Step 1a: Development of the Manuscript and Art Package
Once a contract is signed for a project, we begin with manuscript development. The project manager works with the author to ensure the manuscript and art package is being prepared properly. We may have the author work within a template in Word or just directly in Word or a similar word processing program. The art package needs to be kept separate from the Word document. One mistake new authors sometimes make is that they try to make their manuscript "pretty." That's our job! We want our authors to concentrate on the writing and we'll concentrate on the publishing.
The high school science textbook is usually submitted by batches of chapters. The chapters are then run through a safety check to be sure the experiments are safe and to add any cautions or warnings that may be needed. They would also develop a materials list for the kit component of the program.
We would also have the manuscript copy-edited. A copy-editor reads the manuscript and checks grammar, spelling and sentence structure. They may also cross reference the student and teacher editions and any other ancillary components to be sure everything makes sense. They will also watch for consistency in the writing style and may be asked to adjust the sentence structures to lower a a certain reading level, if needed. The terms within the content will also play a role in the reading levels. We would have authors review and approve the copy-edits.
At the same time the manuscript is being developed, we work with designers to create the cover and interior designs. I'll discuss that more in my next submission.
I don’t know about you, but when I was in school, there was no such thing as talented and gifted resources, gifted education books, or, for that matter, talented and gifted education. We had accelerated courses, but those were more about working a grade level ahead, using a high school biology book in 8th grade, or using middle school books in 5th grade, rather than the textbooks for elementary school.
What type of accelerated learning resources is your school using? Do you have a budget for books for gifted students? At my son’s school, the gifted teacher does a wonderful job of creating projects for the children using ideas of her own because she doesn’t have a budget. But I think about how much easier her job would be and how much more robust the program could be if she had a budget to purchase a curriculum for high ability learners.
Have you checked out our gifted and accelerated learning resources lately? Whether it's elementary education books for gifted students or high school science textbooks for accelerated learners, we have something that will meet your needs. One of our partners is the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William & Mary with whom we publish a curriculum for high ability learners that spans the subjects of Language Arts, Science and Social Studies and grades 1-11. Additionally, the program offers teacher resources and lesson plans for gifted and talented. You can find the program 
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