Welcome To Thursday Gifted

It was great to see so many returning students and a few new faces as well.  Our fifth grade class is growing! In fact, our entire San Mateo gifted program is growing! 

The Olympics ended recently, so it seemed like the perfect "teachable moment" to have the students learn about Ancient Greece, the Ancient Olympics, and how they relate to the Olympics today.  We began with research about five ancient city-states.  We worked on a chart comparing all five:  Sparta, Athens, Corinth (these are the big three), Megara, and Argos.  During the next four weeks we will continue to do research and we will learn how to use a choice menu to select activities we'd like to do that also address our learning strengths.  All of this will prepare us for the Geek Olympics on week 6.  Our class will be divided into city-states. Since we are such a large class, Ms. Zeiler may create a couple new city-states to keep our city-state groups small so that everyone can participate in every event. We will have to create a flag, anthem, and oath for our city-state.  We will dress in togas, parade through the school waving our city-state flag and Ms. Zeiler will release at least one dove. Then the Geek Olympics will begin. Ms. Zeiler hasn't told us what the events are, but she promises they will be fun :o) The gold medal team will wear a laurel wreath, stand on the highest pedestal and listen to the whole class sing that country's anthem.  Silver and bronze winners will receive medals.

We learned how to do Deducibles today, a logic activity where we eliminated letters and used logic to determine words that could be spelled with the leftover letters.  We also did Stories With Holes. Ms. Zeiler or a student reads a short story that has missing information.  We ask 'yes' and 'no' questions to try and figure out the rest of the story. Here's one to think about: Mr. Fry is more excited about the down part of his life than he is about the up part. This is perfectly understandable.  Why?  Ms. Zeiler will ask this one next week.  You can get a head start by commenting on this post (yes and no questions only).  Here's a start:

Question:  Is Mr. Fry a cartoon?
Answer: No
Question:  Is Mr. Fry a pilot
Answer:    No
Question:  Does Mr. Fry work?
Answer:  Yes

We began work on a creative activity today.  Ms. Zeiler first did some "listing" with us.  In listing she gives us a topic and 75 seconds to write down everything related to that topic. The topics today were:  Things I Like To Do, Foods I  Like To Eat, and Things That Are Important To Me.  Then we used our answers to turn our names into letters that represent some of the things we listed.   Hopefully, we can post some of the completed pieces next week.