Extension Activity of the Week - 5

This week: Creative writing

An esteemed colleague commented this week that writing was not considered a fun activity anymore. I couldn't help but wonder - is it because, so often, it isn't? I'm certainly guilty of doling out writing tasks that consist chiefly of formulaic exam answers and essays, with only the odd bit of creative writing thrown in here and there as a homework.

However, pupils of all abilities and ages enjoy the opportunity to write stories, as evidenced by the three page American West tale an often difficult pupil lovingly crafted for me one lesson.

Set pupils an extension task of writing a short story in which all the main characters are key words from the lesson. For example, in science, Mr Red Blood Cell might get in his car and drive down the Vena Cava for a meeting in the Atrium....evidently my creative writing skills are as strong as my knowledge of the circulatory system, but hopefully you get the idea.

The "stories" can be displayed in your classroom, or photocopied and distributed, or placed on the school webpage. You could offer a small, sugar-based prize for the most creative, or the best use of key words or connectives. And perhaps, the more "fun" writing they complete, the less onerous they will find writing in general.

Helpful Facebook Apps

This post lists 101 Useful facebook Applications, though a lot of them are aimed at American college students. Here's my pick of the most useful ones for school pupils.

• Flashcards: Create virtual flashcards tailored to your subject.
• Make a Quiz!: Create quizzes to test yourself and your study partners.
• Quiz Monster: Prepare for exams by creating quizzes.
• Box files: Provides 1 GB of free online storage, where you can store files in various formats.
• Calculator: A functional calculator app.
• Dictionary: Use this dictionary like, well, a dictionary.
• Google Docs: Monitor your Google Docs from within Facebook.
• Google Translate: Get help in language classes with this app that translates Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Greek, Dutch, Korean, Czech, Croatian, Hebrew, Swedish, Turkish, Thai and more.
• Language Exchange: Connect with language exchange partners teaching more than 70 languages, with lessons managed through your Facebook profile.
• Learn 10: Daily content designed to help you learn one of 20 different languages.
• Task Master: To-do list manager with color-coded tasks, due dates, sorting, filters and task sharing with friends.
• To Do List: Helps you organize, tag and color-code all of your tasks and errands.

Extension Activity of the Week - 4

This week: Twittering

The Guardian's annual April Fool this year told of how they were going to transfer all their archived material onto Twitter. For those who haven't heard of it, Twitter is a website in which users "tweet" to each other about what's going on in their lives, in 140 characters or less.

This sort of summarising can really help pupils to pick out the important bits of information from a lesson. Challenge students to squeeze all the information they have covered into one sentence. Set some boundaries, for example, it has to make sense, it cannot involve text abbreviations, it has to be a sentence and not just a list of keywords. After the lesson they could even text the message to somebody who missed the class.

If you fancy trying Twitter for yourself - it's not just for gossip. Try searching for #SMARTboard for messages which will give you some good tips on using your IWB.

A parent view of differentiation

This blog post is written by the parent of a gifted child, about her view on ability groupings in the classroom.

As I've mentioned before, in the feedback I receive from pupils and parents here, the desire for setting appears consistently, every time. It seems this is the case with gifted children everywhere!

QCA Guidance

Here's some QCA Guidance on teaching the Gifted and Talented.

I particularly like the case studies - lots of them, not all subject specific, and the ones I have looked at seem really easy to slot into my practice.

Extension Activity of the Week 3

This week: Challenging Texts

Using a more challenging source of information is a good way to add extra detail to a lesson topic through the extension task. The text might be a technical manual, an article from a journal, a primary source, a weather log, or pages from a textbook aimed at an older age group. We've probably all got university textbooks left over from our past studies - now's the time to put them to good use!

What can they do with it? Here are three examples: answer questions; use a highlighter to pick out key points/words - perhaps any specialist vocabulary used; draw a diagram or cartoon for each paragaph to summarise - this sometimes leads to some very interesting pictures.

Extension Activity of the Week - 2

This week: Odd One Out

Studies show that AG&T pupils often perform poorly in multiple choice exams because their reasoning skills are better developed, so they come up with different answers to everybody else. In addition to this, many AG&T pupils find it very difficult to accept that there is more than one solution to a problem - particularly when they are certain they have the "right" one.

Odd One Out can tap into these reasoning skills and encourage students to think about how they reach solutions, and also to consider alternative points of view.

The length of time taken to complete an Odd One Out exercise can vary according to how many words, pictures, calculations, diagrams etc are included in the puzzle. Challenging AG&T students to come up with several solutions and justify each one will encourage them to think creatively - and it's the sort of puzzle that could just require typing the key words into a slide or a word document and having it ready to show at the end of the lesson.

Extension Activity of the Week - 1

Each week I have a slot in the staff bulletin to share an extension activity.

I decided to put them here as well, mostly so I don't forget which ones I've already done.

Let's Get Quizzical
A recent study showed that regular testing helps us to remember things - what a breakthrough! In addition to this, Matravers AG&T pupils tell us that they enjoy learning more when there is an element of competition.

As an extension, students could write a short quiz on the lesson content for the rest of the class to complete as a plenary.

A range of styles could be used, such as true/false, multiple choice, odd one out, or Jeopardy-style, where the pupils come up with the answers and the rest of the class has to guess the question. Look in the Extension Activities folder for more examples.

Pupils could create the quiz in the back of their exercise books, on scrap paper, on mini whiteboards, or on the classroom computer - in which case, the quiz could be placed on the VLE and set as a homework activity.

Interesting article on differentiation

This article, by researchers at Duke University in the USA, talks about how ability groupings can affect AG&T pupils. It reminds me a little of the old research about single sex schooling - girls do better in single sex, but boys do better in mixed. This article suggests that gifted learners do better when they are streamed with others of their abilitiy, whereas those at the other end of the scale do better in mixed groups.

The research is backed up by the questionnaires I have been doing with pupils at my own school. Every year, pupils and parents alike hold up the subjects which set their groups by ability as the best learning environments. I'm personally quite a big fan of mixed sets, but I can easily see why the AG&T pupils prefer to be with people of their own ability. For a start, the work is usually going to be pitched at the right level, since most teachers differentiate down very well, but not up.

I'm looking quite a lot at top down planning this term. I want to launch it with the teaching and learning group next term. It involves planning for the brightest kid in the class and then differentiating down, which should reduce the amount of work required, since you're only going one way.

There's not much out there about top down planning, though, apart from references in dozens of AG&T policies and the Lead Teacher handbook.