Bringing Teaching for the Gifted to All Kids
By EMILY ALPERT
Voice of San Diego
Sept. 21, 2009
Sandra Ruvalcaba isn't sure if she would have tapped Dominic Satterfield as a gifted child before. His reading was a little weak and he struggled with writing last year at Cabrillo Elementary in Point Loma. But when the teacher began to use strategies for gifted children with all of her students, Dominic suddenly seemed to stand out. He flourished.
His mother Sadie said it was "100 percent different" than the way she was taught as a child, and she liked what she saw. Dominic relished getting into debates with other children about the ethics of playground squabbles. He is a pint-sized philosopher with a karate T-shirt and a frank and surprisingly adult manner, who readily picks out what his teachers call the "Big Ideas" -- one of the buzzwords that mark the new strategies -- in classic stories such as the Tortoise and the Hare.
"The turtle was slow. The hare judged him. No one really thought that the hare wouldn't win -- he's the fastest living creature in the universe," Dominic, now in 2nd grade, explained after school. "So the big idea is, 'Don't judge a person.'"...
1 comment:
I've seen this strategy at The Academy Learning Center in Solana Beach. Big Ideas teach students to dig deeper. Gifted strategies benefit all types of students because of the spill over effect. I am so happy you blogged about this important type of teaching.
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