How can we help students develop resilience to persevere in the face of setbacks? How can we ignite a drive that will inspire them to sustain effort even through difficulty? This book equips teachers to deliberately cultivate psychosocial skills, including self-awareness, problem solving to deal with setbacks, assertive interpersonal skills, and intellectual risk-taking. By teaching students to be aware of how their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors affect their pursuit of excellence, students can learn to tackle challenges and setbacks that they might experience as they reach to achieve. Lessons include engaging activities and curriculum connections, covering topics related to perfectionism, mindset, grit, stress, procrastination, social-emotional intelligence, and more.
Grades 4-Equipped with the #1 guide to help kids with math homework, children will be able to quickly find the definitions and illustrated examples that will enable them to solve many of the math challenges they face. Covering everything from addend to zero, the fifth edition of the best-selling Math Dictionary for Kids gives students in grades 4-9 more than 400 definitions, full-color illustrations, and examples that can help them solve math problems.This handbook includes illustrated, concise explanations of the most common terms used in general math classes, categorized by subjects that include measurement, algebra, geometry, fractions and decimals, statistics and probability, and problem solving. This edition also discusses how students can use manipulatives and basic math tools to improve their understanding and includes handy measurement conversion tables. Each term has a concise definition and an example or illustration. Perfect for both kids and their parents looking to help them with math homework!
Winner of NAGC's 2021 Book of the Year Award
This must-have resource:
The book also includes considerations for working with special populations, including twice-exceptional students, underachievers, and culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse learners, as well as meeting students' social-emotional needs, collaborating with families and communities, and advocating for gifted education.
Teacher's Survival Guide: Gifted Education is packed with practical information, up-to-date resources, tips for success, and advice from experts in the field. This updated second edition:
Each chapter features a key question, making the book ideal for an engaging book study, as well as survival tips and a survival toolkit of resources to keep readers on course as they navigate through gifted ed.
Ready-to-Use Resources for Mindsets in the Classroom provides educators with tools they need to help students change their thinking about their abilities and potential. This updated 2020 edition of the book features ready-to-use, interactive tools for students, teachers, parents, administrators, and professional development educators. Parent resources include a sample parent webpage and several growth mindset parent education tools. Other resources include: mindset observation forms, student and teacher look fors, critical thinking strategy write-ups and samples, and a unique study guide for the original book that includes book study models from various schools around the country. The updated edition also includes a guide to 100 picture books and 50 extended texts that contribute to growth mindset thinking. This book is perfect for schools looking to implement the ideas in Mindsets in the Classroom so that they can build a growth mindset learning environment. When students believe that dedication and hard work can change their performance in school, they grow to become resilient, successful students. This book contains many of the things that schools needs to create a growth mindset school culture in which perseverance can lead to success!
Winner of the 2015 NAGC Curriculum Studies Award
Perspectives of Power explores the nature of power in literature, historical documents, poetry, and art. Lessons include a major focus on rigorous evidence-based discourse through the study of common themes and content-rich, challenging nonfiction and fictional texts. This unit, developed by Vanderbilt University's Programs for Talented Youth and aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), guides students to explore the power of oppression; the power of the past, present, and future; and the power of personal response by engaging in simulations, skits, creative projects, literary analyses, Socratic seminars, and debates.
Texts illuminate content extensions that interest many high-ability students including bystander effect, social class structure, game theory, the use and abuse of technology, cultural conflict, the butterfly effect, women's suffrage, and surrealism as each relates to power. Lessons include close readings with text-dependent questions, choice-based differentiated products, rubrics, formative assessments, and ELA writing tasks that require students to analyze texts for rhetorical features, literary elements, and themes through argument, explanatory, and/or prose-constructed writing.
Ideal for pre-AP and honors courses, the unit features texts from Emily Dickinson, William B. Yeats, and Charles Perrault; art from Moyo Okediji and Salvador Dali; and speeches by Elie Wiesel, Susan B. Anthony, and John F. Kennedy. As a result from the learning in the unit, students will be able to examine powerful influences in their own lives and identify their own power in personal responsibility.
Grades 6-8
With increasing emphasis on inclusive classrooms, primary and elementary school teachers can use the information included in Successful Inclusion Strategies for Early Childhood Teachers to build a supportive, caring, learner-driven environment that takes into account the needs of all students.
Covering topics from incorporating the needs of students with a variety of special needs to working one-on-one with students to modify classroom experiences, this book offers field-tested strategies for teachers in a concise, friendly format. The authors also provide an overview of how special education law affects inclusive classrooms. The book provides multiple vignettes describing special needs most often found in inclusive classrooms, including autism, ADHD, visual and hearing impairments, and developmental delays, as well as suggested tools and strategies for working with these students. A special section on adapting classroom materials provides teachers with guidance for modifying and differentiating their curriculum to encourage learning in children with special needs. This book is a valuable resource for early childhood teachers, administrators, and childcare directors.Mystery at Golden Ridge Farm, an interdisciplinary problem-based learning unit for gifted students, is open-ended and subject to various interpretations. A local, community-supported agricultural farm has noted a mysterious lack of produce for a number of consecutive years. Unable to explain why or how the produce is disappearing, the farm owners ask the students of a local school for help in solving the mystery of the missing produce. Students work in collaboration with the farm as they assume the role of detectives and investigate the problem from every angle. Along the way, they are required to conduct independent research, evaluate their research with classmates, develop logical theories, create solutions, and prepare a formal presentation of their findings to present to a panel of judges and audience of family members and school administrators. This unit is appropriate for grades 5-8.
This practical, easy-to-read book explores the basics of parenting gifted children, truly giving parents the introductory course they need to better understand and help their gifted child. Topics include myths about gifted children, characteristics of the gifted, the hows and whys of advocacy, social and emotional issues and needs, strategies for partnering with your child's school, and more. Parenting Gifted Children 101 explores ways for you to help your child at home and maximize your child's educational experience with strategies that are based on research, but easy to implement. Each chapter--from parenting twice-exceptional students to navigating the possible challenges that school may hold for your child--contains resources for further reading and insights from more than 50 parents and educators of gifted children.
Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented 2017 Legacy Book Award Winner - ParentingThe Social and Emotional Curriculum for Gifted Students series provides the gifted resource specialist, regular classroom teacher, or counselor with the tools they need to help gifted students in grades 3-5 develop interpersonal skills, reflect on their often intense emotions, and express their creativity. The grade 3 book:
Each classroom-tested lesson addresses one or more affective standards from the National Association for Gifted Children, psychosocial development areas for gifted learners, and academic standards.
The Social and Emotional Curriculum for Gifted Students series provides the gifted resource specialist, regular classroom teacher, or counselor with the tools they need to help gifted students in grades 3-5 develop interpersonal skills, reflect on their often intense emotions, and express their creativity. The grade 4 book:
Each classroom-tested lesson addresses one or more affective standards from the National Association for Gifted Children, psychosocial development areas for gifted learners, and academic standards.
The Social and Emotional Curriculum for Gifted Students series provides the gifted resource specialist, regular classroom teacher, or counselor with the tools they need to help gifted students in grades 3-5 develop interpersonal skills, reflect on their often intense emotions, and express their creativity. The grade 5 book:
Each classroom-tested lesson addresses one or more affective standards from the National Association for Gifted Children, psychosocial development areas for gifted learners, and academic standards.
Project-Based Learning for Gifted Students: A Step-by-Step Guide to PBL and Inquiry in the Classroom outlines how to implement PBL in the gifted classroom. This fully updated second edition:
Use this must-have guide to challenge students' thinking, promote rigor, and build engaging authentic, real-world, inquiry-based learning experiences.
The Schoolwide Enrichment Model: A How-to Guide for Talent Development (3rd ed.) presents a common sense approach for helping students achieve and engage in joyful learning. Based on years of research, the Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM) is founded on highly successful practices originally developed for programs for gifted students. The SEM promotes a rising tide lifts all ships approach to school improvement by applying general enrichment strategies to all students and opportunities for advanced level follow-up opportunities for superior learners and highly motivated students.
This guidebook shows educators step by step how to develop their own SEM program based on their own local resources, student population, and faculty strengths and interests. Instead of offering students a one-size-fits-all curriculum, the model helps educators look at each student's strengths, interests, learning styles, and preferred modes of expression and capitalize on these assets. The book highlights the model's fundamentals and underlying research and provides information about organizational components, service delivery options, and resources for implementation. The book suggests methods for engaging and challenging identified gifted students and provides practical resources for teachers using the SEM with all students.What does it mean to be a successful person? What traits and characteristics define successful people? Why do gifted children, in particular, need a strong affective curricula in order to maximize their potential? These questions and more are explored in this guide to helping gifted children in grades 4-7 as they navigate the complicated social and emotional aspects of their lives. This curriculum is designed to help gifted children explore their giftedness, develop resiliency, manage their intensities, face adversities and tough situations, and cultivate their talents and passions. Including lesson plans, worksheets, and connections to Common Core State Standards, I'm Not Just Gifted is the practical guide necessary for anyone serving and working with gifted children.
Grades 4-7One pervasive educational issue is the national underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students in gifted education. Virtually every school district is grappling with having too few students from these groups identified as gifted and served in gifted classes and programs. Recruiting and Retaining Culturally Different Students in Gifted Education addresses this long-standing national problem through the dual lens of recruitment and retention. The focus is on how to equitably recruit (screen, refer, and/or assess) culturally different students and, just as importantly, to retain them. Recruitment and retention require providing academic, cultural, and social supports to culturally different students and ensuring that educators are willing and able to address issues and barriers. No time is better than now to address and correct the underachievement albatross, and the focus on recruitment and retention holds the greatest promise.
Nominated for a 2014 NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Literary Work-Instructional CategoryAchieving Equity in Gifted Programming offers practical, research-based programming implementations to increase equity in gifted education and:
Flame throwers, spy trees, bird bombs, and Hell Fighters were all a part of World War I, but you won't learn that in your history books! Uncover long-lost secrets of spies like Howard Burnham, The One-Legged Wonder, and nurse-turned-spy, Edith Cavell. Peek into secret files to learn the truth about the Red Baron and the mysterious Mata Hari. Then learn how to build your own Zeppelin balloon and mix up some invisible ink. It's all part of the true stories from the Top Secret Files: World War I. Take a look if you dare, but be careful! Some secrets are meant to stay hidden . . .
Ages 9-12Winner of the 2012 NAGC Curriculum Studies Award
In the Mind's Eye: Truth Versus Perception invites students on a philosophical exploration of the themes of truth and perception. Lessons include a major emphasis on rigorous evidence-based discourse through the study of common themes and content-rich, challenging informational and fictional texts. This unit, developed by Vanderbilt University's Programs for Talented Youth and aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), applies concepts from Plato's Allegory of the Cave to guide students to discover how reality is presented and interpreted in fiction, nonfiction, art, and media.
Students engage in activities such as Socratic seminars, literary analyses, skits, and art projects, and creative writing to understand differing perceptions of reality. Lessons include close readings with text-dependent questions, choice-based differentiated products, rubrics, formative assessments, and ELA tasks that require students to analyze texts for rhetorical features, literary elements, and themes through argument, explanatory, and prose-constructed writing.
Ideal for pre-AP and honors courses, the unit features art from M.C. Escher and Vincent Van Gogh, short stories from Guy de Maupassant and Shirley Jackson, longer texts by Daniel Keyes and Ray Bradbury, and informational texts related to sociology, Nazi propaganda, and Christopher Columbus. This unit encourages students to translate learning to real-life contexts and problems by exploring themes of disillusionment, social deception, and the power of perception.
Grades 6-8