Christmas ideas

Christmas lessons and activities are great motivational techniques. Some of the best activities in an inclusional classroom include brainstorming activities. When you provide students with the opportunity to brainstorm, you are actually using differentiated instruction. Brainstorms work well for gifted learners, mainstream learners and disabled learners.
Consider some of these questions:

1. How many different Christmas words can you think of?

2. How many different things can you put on a Christmas tree?

3. What realistic types of gifts do you want this year and why?

4. How many different things can you do on the Christmas holiday?

5. How many different foods can you think of for Christmas?

6. Why is Christmas special to you?

7. How many different Christmas songs can you think of?

8. How many words can you find using only the letters in the word Christmas?

9. List all your different memories of Christmas.

10. Think of all the different things that happen at your house at Christmas. (Types of decorations, visitors etc.)

Brainstorms can be in writing or done in small or large groups in the classroom. All students have the chance to feel successful during brainstorm types of activities.

Recognizing Gifted Student Characteristics

Recognizing the Characteristics of Gifted Children
ERIC Clearinghouse on Handicapped and Gifted Children (1985) cites three types of characteristics of gifted children: general behavioral, learning, and creative characteristics.
General Behavior Characteristics

Gifted children's behavior differs from that of their age-mates in the following ways:

Many gifted children learn to read early, with better comprehension of the nuances of language. As much as half the gifted and talented population has learned to read before entering school.
Gifted children often read widely, quickly, and intensely and have large vocabularies.
Gifted children commonly learn basic skills better, more quickly, and with less practice.
They are better able to construct and handle abstractions.
They often pick up and interpret nonverbal cues and can draw inferences that other children need to have spelled out for them.
They take less for granted, seeking the "hows" and "whys."
They can work independently at an earlier age and can concentrate for longer periods.
Their interests are both wildly eclectic and intensely focused.
They often have seemingly boundless energy, which sometimes leads to a misdiagnosis of hyperactivity.
They usually respond and relate well to parents, teachers, and other adults. They may prefer the company of older children and adults to that of their peers.
They like to learn new things, are willing to examine the unusual, and are highly inquisitive.
They tackle tasks and problems in a well-organized, goal-directed, and efficient manner.
They exhibit an intrinsic motivation to learn, find out, or explore and are often very persistent. "I'd rather do it myself" is a common attitude.


Learning Characteristics

Gifted children are natural learners who often show many of these characteristics:

They may show keen powers of observation and a sense of the significant; they have an eye for important details.
They may read a great deal on their own, preferring books and magazines written for children older than they are.
They often take great pleasure in intellectual activity.
They have well-developed powers of abstraction, conceptualization, and synthesis.
They readily see cause-effect relationships.
They often display a questioning attitude and seek information for its own sake as much as for its usefulness.
They are often skeptical, critical, and evaluative. They are quick to spot inconsistencies.
They often have a large storehouse of information about a variety of topics, which they can recall quickly.
They readily grasp underlying principles and can often make valid generalizations about events, people, or objects.
They quickly perceive similarities, differences, and anomalies.
They often attack complicated material by separating it into components and analyzing it systematically.


Creative Characteristics

Gifted children's creative abilities often set them apart from their age-mates. These characteristics may take the following forms:

Gifted children are fluent thinkers, able to generate possibilities, consequences, or related ideas.
They are flexible thinkers, able to use many different alternatives and approaches to problem solving.
They are original thinkers, seeking new, unusual, or unconventional associations and combinations among items of information.
They can also see relationships among seemingly unrelated objects, ideas, or facts.
They are elaborate thinkers, producing new steps, ideas, responses, or other embellishments to a basic idea, situation, or problems.
They are willing to entertain complexity and seem to thrive on problem solving.
They are good guessers and can readily construct hypotheses or "what if" questions.
They often are aware of their own impulsiveness and irrationality, and they show emotional sensitivity.
They are extremely curious about objects, ideas, situations, or events.
They often display intellectual playfulness and like to fantasize and imagine.
They can be less intellectually inhibited than their peers are in expressing opinions and ideas, and they often disagree spiritedly with others' statements.
They are sensitive to beauty and are attracted to aesthetic values.

Some Myths About Gifted Children

Gifted Kids are like cream that rises to the top in a classroom:

Not necessarily. Gifted Children can have hidden learning disabilities that go undiscovered because they can easily compensate for them in the early years. As time goes on though, it becomes harder and harder for them to excel. Which can lead to behavior problems and depression.


Gifted Kids are so smart they do fine with or without special programs:

They may appear to do fine on their own. But without proper challenge they can become bored and unruly. As the years go by they may find it harder and harder as work does become more challenging, since they never faced challenge before.


Gifted and Talented means the same thing:

Again, not necessarily. There is no rule that states that a child who is capable of scoring to the high ninety percentiles on group achievement testing must be considered gifted. We must remember that achievement tests like the Metropolitan Achievement Tests are "Grade Level Testing". Such a child is most definitely Academically Talented. But further individualized IQ and out of level academic testing must be given before we can define that child as "Gifted". At the same time, there is no rule that states a child identified as gifted should be Achieving to high standards in the classroom. This type of stereotyping can do serious and irreversible damage to both groups. ANY child can benefit from enrichment. Academically Talented Children can benefit from Honors (Grade Level) Classes. Intellectually Gifted children need a differentiated curriculum and possibly even a different environment.


They need to go through school with their own age mates:

Where it's true that children need to play and interact socially with other children their age, they do not need to learn with them. Especially in the case of a highly gifted child who may have a chronological age of six and a mental age of 11 who has been reading since two. To put that child in a reading class with other six year olds who are just learning to read is sheer torture for that child.
Giftedness is something to be jealous about:
This is perhaps the most damaging myth. More often than not gifted children can feel isolated and misunderstood. They have more adult tastes in music, clothing, reading material and food. These differences to other children can cause them to be shunned and even abused verbally or physically by other children. Experts in the field of gifted education are beginning to address the higher incidences of ADHD and Spelling/Handwriting disabilities in the gifted population verses those in the much larger normal population.

This information was taken from the following website: http://www.ri.net/gifted_talented/character.html

This book, Identifying Gifted Students: A Practical Guide, focuses on screening and selecting gifted and talented students. It is designed for practicing professionals – teachers, counselors, psychologists, and administrators – who must make decisions daily about identifying and serving gifted and talented students. Since it is a service publication of the Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented (TAGT), it addresses specifically the concerns of implementing a K-12 program that meets compliance standards for the state of Texas. However, many of these concerns are relevant to other states that use multiple assessments with an increasingly diverse population.
Cost: Approximately $17 on Amazon