The GATErs' Blog GATE scholars sharing our learning with the world! 

I have been “meeting” a lot of people (parents, teachers, and administrators) in the Gifted and Talented community on Twitter  and thought I’d share how my school’s GATE program works.  Hope to hear an overview of some of your programs as well!

First of all, all the schools in my district support GATE students, but in different ways.  The classrooms at my school are of mixed ability.  My school chose to spend the money to hire a GATE teacher to support the approximately 100 students in 4th-6th grades.    The teachers have had trainings in differentiation and have a Universal Access or Workshop time where they work in small groups.  They differentiate the California standards for the gifted students to challenge them.

Here’s where I come in… I pull the gifted students into the library/media center for 1 hour a week to provide even more depth, complexity and enrichment.  One hour a week doesn’t sound like a lot, but it gives me a chance to teach them tools like Thinking Maps (adding a Frame of Reference for metacognition) and Depth and Complexity icons in a homogenous group.  Then, I will be showing these tools to the teachers so they will be able to embed them into the rest of the curriculum.

Another bonus to me pulling them out of their general education classroom is it gives the teachers an hour a week to reteach and review with a smaller number of students.  If a gifted student happens to need to be retaught a concept, the teacher can keep them instead of sending them to GATE with me.

How does your school meet the needs of these students??

In all likelihood, you have never struggled to obtain safe, fresh drinking water.  You probably have always considered water a natural, limitless resource, but one BILLION people do not have access to clean water to drink.  This is a huge ethical issue because it is killing many people.  According to the World Water Council,

…the right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity, but often denied in developing as well as developed countries.

Today we will explore the ethical issues having to do with water. Click on the banner below to explore and then return to the blog to comment on what surprised you the most.

Today we will use 3 Depth and Complexity icons to explore world water usage as we Think Like a Hydrologist…

You learn the difference between fresh and saline water and its distribution on Earth, as well as the very small percentage that is available for human uses. What percentage of Earth’s water do you think is fresh, and what percentage do you think is saline?  Examine the online maps of our world’s water (and related graphs) to visualize the quantities. 

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/freshwater-map.html

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/waterdistribution.html

Now we are going to look at the world’s water usage. Start with the first map showing the world land area as it changes to a population map.  What do you notice?  http://www.worldmapper.org/animations/wm01to02.html 

World Water Use

Finally, browse some of the other cartograms referring to water.  (Put water in the search box). What trends do you notice? http://www.worldmapper.org/results.php