Today was filled with divergent thinking! That is after all, why we all belong in the gifted classroom--our divergence!
A simple discussion about the digestive organs of the frog turned to topics such as what happens when you eat asparagus (The kids may try this one soon.) to the ethics of animal research, to organ transplants, to medical ethics, to domination of human culture over animals. Phew!!! It was a lot to wade through in less than an hour. Not all of that was intentional, but the kids ask AMAZING questions. They genuinely want to wade into these ambiguous gray areas and want our support along the way. I'm proud that they're unafraid of the ambiguity. I encouraged them to pursue these issues in their adult work, if they are passionate about them. We continued our journey down Divergent Drive with a fluency and originality exercise: "Things that vanish". The responses were really unusual and interesting like: sympathy, good health, tasty food, ideas, etc. Our trek to Divergent Land extended to a creative problem solving activity using our book Ungifted. The kids identified the major characters and a problem for each of them. The task was to come up with a creative solution to the character's problem. Solutions could be presented in any format. So far, we had a clay sculpture, and 2 skits. After all the writing they've done lately, it was great to see other ways to bring ideas to life! I can't wait to see the rest of the solutions. I hear there's at least one song! We also watched an episode of the movie, Silverwing. You may remember this story from the Bats unit of several years ago. The kids made many good connections between the bats and frogs, survival of animals, and even our novel, Ungifted. That is fantastic! The final activity was a session in the library with Mrs. Kindschy. The kids worked on note taking for their research. HW: Google Doc 4. Students should have at least 3-5 solid sources by next week. Until n
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AuthorFifth grade was the year I learned all about dolphins, read EVERY Beverly Cleary book, and made brownies from scratch. YUM! Archives
March 2022
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