Webinars for Teachers of Gifted Students

A lot of Prufrock blog space has been devoted to using technology in the classroom, and there are so many websites, programs, apps, and other tools out there to make your classroom a more exciting and engaging place that we could keep writing about it forever. We spend less time, however, on how technology can help teachers outside the classroom. One great resource is webinars. Webinars take place all the time—at least three gifted-focused webinars will be taking place this week alone.

The University of California, Irvine is hosting a webinar tomorrow, February 26, at 7 p.m. Pacific time called “Tech Tools to Differentiate and Engage Gifted Learners.” Registration is free and open to the public.
SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted) is also hosting a webinar tomorrow called “Understanding Insanity: Practical Applications for Parents, Teachers, and Counselors.” It is hosted by Michelle Kane, Ed.D. and takes place at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time.
NAGC hosts WOW! Webinars on Wednesdays, and this week’s session (which takes place on February 27 at 7 p.m. Eastern time) is called “Implementing the Common Core State Standards with Various Program Models in Gifted Education.” It is presented by Alicia Cotabish and Bronwyn MacFarlane.

Although many webinars charge fees for attendance, some (like the UC Irvine one, above) do not. If you know of any particularly interesting webinars taking place in the near future, please feel free to share them below!

Expanding the Vocabularies of Gifted Students

A recent study from Michigan-based researchers highlights the plight of students who enter kindergarten with less-developed vocabularies. As this Ed Week article points out, “By age 3 . . . youngsters from well-to-do families have a working vocabulary of 1,116 words, compared to 749 words for children in working-class families and 525 words for children on welfare.” The study demonstrates that this gap persists: “early-literacy instruction fails to overcome the verbal gaps between demographic groups,” as Core Knowledge Foundation founder E. D. Hirsch Jr. explains.

“It’s been one of the most resistant-to-change skills in early literacy,” says study coauthor Susan B. Neuman. “Generally, children come into school with vocabulary at one point and leave with vocabulary at the same point.”

Although the study did not target gifted students particularly, such findings may have implications for gifted programs. If children of poverty demonstrate more limited vocabularies and are unable to close the verbal gap, it may lead to difficulties in properly identifying gifted children from this socioeconomic group. Such difficulties could also apply to English language learners and other culturally diverse students.

Fortunately, there are resources to help strengthen vocabulary instruction. Dr. Kimberly’s Literacy Blog at Learning Unlimited offers 21 Digital Tools to Build Vocabulary and highlights 10 Characteristics of Effective Vocabulary Instruction. Sarah Ressley Wright’s Vocab Gal blog also offers helpful resources for strengthening students’ vocabulary. Meanwhile, for more information on identifying culturally diverse students, see our book Identifying and Serving Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Gifted Students.

Using Technology in the Gifted Classroom

As this handy little graphic demonstrates, new technology continues to markedly impact classroom learning. But with so many different programs and websites—and more proliferating all of the time—it can be difficult to stay on top of the opportunities that are possible. Here are some resources that can help create a more engaging, interactive, and (hopefully!) exciting gifted classroom.

TeacherVision’s Top 10 Educational Technology Resources is a helpful list of some of the most popular classroom tools, including Glogs (from Glogster EDU), SchoolTube, and Storybird, a literacy-boosting program that lets students write and illustrate stories online.
What apps do what is a Google Doc created by Australian teacher Monique Dalli that lists different apps that can be used for educational purposes. Each entry includes a summarization of the app’s primary functions and possible ideas for classroom use. Some of the lesser known resources include Three Ring—an electronic three-ring binder for storing photos and audio and video files—and ShowMe, an app to help create tutorials and iPad-based lessons. As this is an interactive document, anyone can log in and add his or her own favorite resources, so be sure to check back often to see what’s new.
Check out THE Journal’s “5 K–12 Technology Trends to Watch in 2013” for an idea of some of the ways technology is set to affect the educational world in the coming year. From video production to data analytics, K–12 technology experts offer their insights into the technological possibilities lying just over the horizon.

Social Studies Resources for Gifted Students

Is your child wrapped up in books about the American Revolution or the Civil War? Can she list the U.S. Presidents in chronological order? Gifted kids with a penchant for history can consume information at a daunting rate, and it can be hard to keep them satisfied and engaged. Here are some resources that can help.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s website provides a wealth of information on American history, broken down by era. Lectures and essays are available, as are thousands of primary source documents.
The Summer Institute for the Gifted (SIG) offers a page of links to various social studies and geography websites; highlights include Castles on the Web and The History of Costume.
The Museum of the Moving Image hosts The Living Room Candidate, a website full of campaign commercials from Presidential elections dating back to 1952. Election season may be over, but the commercials live on forever. This website also offers lesson plans for classroom use.
Museum websites in general are often a great resource for gifted kids interested in the art, culture, and artifacts of different historical societies. The Smithsonian, the Exploratorium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Louvre are four institutions with particularly well-developed websites that offer a trove of interactive material for students to explore.

2012: Highlights From the Prufrock Press Blog

Now that we’ve rung in the new year (and survived the mythological Mayan apocalypse), it’s a good time to look back at 2012 and the topics that interested our blog readers the most. In case you missed them, here are some of the posts that garnered the most attention throughout the past year.

Creativity—This blog post from March highlighted some of the attributes creative individuals display, and this one from June offered tips on how to engage creative students with art-, music-, and language-focused opportunities.
Thinking Skills—Another topic our readers found interesting was how to get students to engage in critical thinking. Logic puzzles are a great way to boost kids’ thinking skills, and the use of primary documents can help them to better analyze historical information.
Technology—Tablets continued to change the way we think about education, as this blog post illustrates. Blended and flipped classrooms are still buzzing, and online courses are gaining further footing, allowing gifted students to pursue acceleration options that go beyond what’s available in their classrooms.
Innovative Teaching Ideas—We shared some particularly unique topics of study for gifted students this year. From The Hunger Games to video game and theme park design, readers enjoyed learning about these innovative and engaging ideas for teaching gifted students.
Advocacy—Prufrock Press publisher Joel McIntosh wrote this call for action, and many of you shared your thoughts and sympathies. As we enter 2013, this is an issue that will no doubt continue to reverberate as we struggle to provide the best learning opportunities possible for our gifted kids.

Holiday Science Projects for Gifted Students

Gifted kids love hands-on, engaging science projects, and the holiday season provides the opportunity to enjoy some especially fun activities. These are a few of our favorites. Feel free to share your favorite ideas in the comments section below!

Instead of using wrapping paper for gifts, kids can make marbled and scented wrapping paper with shaving cream and food coloring.
Use poinsettias to make pH paper strips, and have your students test various holiday-themed liquids such as eggnog to see if they’re acidic or basic.
Use borax and glue to make a “melting snowman,” or borax and pipe cleaners to make crystal snowflakes.
Boric acid can be used to make pinecones that burn with colored fire.
Benzoic acid, on the other hand, can be used to make your own snow globe.
Older students can conduct labs to make holiday treats such as peppermint cream wafers, candy canes, and peanut brittle.

This is just a festive little sampler of what you can do at your home or in the classroom. Be sure to read the experiments' materials and instructions sections carefully, as some projects involve chemicals. For these and other projects, it is important that adult supervision be provided. More activities can be found at About.com, Hooked on Science, and The High School Laboratory.

Get Your Gifted Students Hooked on Engineering

The College Board, with help from a $5 million grant from Google, recently announced the formation of the AP STEM Access program, designed to create approximately 500 new STEM-focused AP classes in high schools across the country. Female and minority students—typically underrepresented in such programs—will be strongly encouraged to enroll.

If your daughter (or son!) is interested in STEM, there are many resources out there to help foster that interest. One great site is TheMakerMom.com, run by Kim Moldofsky, a tech enthusiast and mother of gifted teen boys. The website has a specific section with resources for gifted kids, and she hosts monthly #STEMchats on Twitter. Last month’s discussion, sponsored by PBS Kids’ Design Squad Nation, focused on “Tweens and Engineering.” Panelists offered resources, as well as advice on how to show kids that engineering helps change the world and how to set up an environment that is conducive to engineering (the transcript, as well as links to all resources, can be found here). The next #STEMchat takes place tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern time: it’s holiday themed and sponsored by littleBits, a company that makes electronic gadgetry kits that help teach kids (and adults) about engineering concepts while having fun, too.

And if you’d like to bring some engineering fun into your classroom, you can check out our book Hands-On Engineering, which teaches 21st-century skills through real-world problems to students in grades 4–7.

Identifying and Assisting Kids With ADHD

More than 10 million children and teens under age 18 have been diagnosed with ADHD. These students face daily struggles, both in and outside of the classroom. The following resources can help your kids with ADHD get the attention they need to succeed personally, socially, and academically.

Helpguide provides a number of school support strategies for parents of children with ADHD, covering topics such as impulsivity, fidgeting, and hyperactivity.

Carol’s Web Corner offers a list of “Top 10 Tips for Teaching ADHD/ADD Children” that can help teachers improve their teaching environments and help students with ADHD in their classrooms better learn.

TeenLife offers tips on how teach your teens with ADHD how to avoid cyberbullying and use appropriate behavior when on the computer.

SpecialedPost offers a “Top 10 Tips” list to help familiarize parents with the behaviors young children with ADHD often display, providing valuable information on the similarities and differences between the conduct of typical active young children and those who may have ADHD.

For students who have already been diagnosed, we offer a number of resources to help them, their parents, and their teachers, including Take Control of ADHD, 101 School Success Tools for Students With ADHD, and Raising Boys With ADHD.

Students With OCD May Have Greater Moral Sensitivity

New research shows that individuals with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) face greater anxiety over moral dilemmas. The study compared 73 patients with OCD to 73 individuals without it and found that people with OCD show greater activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is associated with decision making and moral judgment.

A heightened sense of morality may seem like a good thing, but there are negative implications. The OCD Resource Center of Florida states that “Fear of harming others or self, excessive moralization, and religiosity are often seen in children with OCD. Children and teenagers with OCD frequently have a tendency toward perfectionism and rigidity or stubbornness." They also are likely to “have more anger and guilt."

To help students with OCD overcome their anxiety, OCD Education Station provides helpful advice for the classroom, with an emphasis on fostering awareness among students and boosting self-esteem. The Child Mind Institute provides specific tips on how to best serve students with OCD, including test-taking strategies, homework advice, and seating arrangement considerations.

If you have a child with OCD, you can check out our book, Take Control of OCD, written specifically for kids ages 10–16. It helps students tackle obsessive thoughts, learn to tolerate uncertainty, and develop stress-management techniques, and provides other helpful strategies to help students face their fears.

Stretch Your Gifted Students' Brains With Logic Puzzles

About two years into my tenure as a teacher in Japan, I came up with an idea. It involved a lot of planning, some trial and error, and a big stack of flashcards. When I finished, I went up to a fellow teacher and asked: “Can you solve this?” He looked at me, a skeptical expression on his face.

“Are you going to give a logic puzzle to your students?”

I was, and I did. Logic puzzles can be tricky—even when presented in your native tongue!—so to give one, in English, to Japanese elementary students was maybe a little ambitious. But they loved it! The brightest ones especially took to it like fish to water. One group even managed to solve it.

Kids love logic puzzles. Both deductive and inductive puzzles can be used to strengthen students' thinking skills. Puzzle Baron’s Logic Puzzles are a good source for the former, and Interview Puzzles has examples of the latter. Gifted students in particular often display a propensity for inductive thinking, and Byrdseed has lots of resources on the subject, including a brief overview, inductive math games, and advice on using it with spelling and vocabulary.

Education World suggests a puzzle a day to help bolster students’ critical thinking skills and has a host of resources to help incorporate them into your lessons. And of course, we offer plenty of books to help improve kids’ thinking skills from an early age, including the Lollipop Logic series, Logic Safari, and Logic Countdown.