Kathleen Machan, Resource Teacher of the Gifted contact: Kathleen.machan@apsva.us

 

 

The Office of Gifted Services complies with Virginia Regulations Governing Educational Services for Gifted Students based on the following concepts.

While working with gifted identified students and visiting classrooms this year, I will provide instruction to develop stronger critical and abstract thinking skills. Some activities the students may engage in include:

FFOE

 

• Fluency:  generate MANY IDEAS
• Flexibility: CHANGE information and ideas for a new purpose
• Originality: generate UNUSUAL, CLEVER and UNIQUE ideas and solutions
• Elaboration: DEVELOP and EXPAND on an idea

Critical Thinking Strategy: S.C.A.M.P.E.R

 

This strategy, developed by Bob Eberle, helps students to generate new ideas by using fluent, flexible and elaborative thinking. I work with students to create new products, ideas or inventions to solve problems. The acronym S.C.A.M.P.E.R stands for:

• Substitute- replace with something else
• Combine-two or more objects
• Adapt-change to fit the situation
• Modify/Minify/Magnify-change size, color, shape
• Put to other uses-use in another way
• Eliminate-remove or omit one or more parts
• Reverse/Rearrange-put in a different order

De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats

This strategy, developed by Edward de Bono, helps students to view and discuss problems from different thinking perspectives. In these lessons, students create “hat packs” to consider various ways to think about ideas or situations. For example, the students may consider “What if…” situations such as “What if we had a weather machine that would make it summer all the time?” The six thinking hats represent:

• Red Hat: Intuition and feelings
• Yellow Hat: Benefits
• Purple Hat: Caution, problems and assessment
• Green Hat: Creativity and different ideas
• White Hat: Information and questions
• Blue Hat: Organization of thinking

The Stock Market Game (5th grade Math Identified Students)

 

Students will have the opportunity to participate in The Stock Market Game™ (SMG) which is endorsed by the New York Stock Exchange. Participants have the chance to invest a hypothetical $100,000 in an on-line portfolio.

Hands-On Equations (4th Grade Math Identified)

Hands-On Equations^® is a visual, kinesthetic and pictorial supplementary math program for introducing algebraic concepts to elementary school students. Students work to understand and solve such algebraic linear equations as:                2 (x + 4) + x + x + 16.