Cassidy Gifted & Talented News
Week of January 23
Announcements
Third Grade PTP Parent Information Night: Wednesday, February 1 from 5:30-6:30 in the Cassidy Library
- This is an informational meeting for 3rd grade parents (although all are welcome to attend if you wish) to discuss the transition out of Primary Talent Pool at the end of 3rd grade (since Primary Talent Pool is only for grades K-3) and the process for admission into Gifted and Talented in 4th Grade.
4-H Forms
- If you have a child in leadership, please complete the 4-H form that will be coming home in your child's backpack and return it to their classroom teacher (who will send it along to me). Some students have already completed and returned them. We have members of the Fayette County 4-H program coming and doing some leadership activities with us and they have requested that we complete these forms.
Reading
All Grade Levels: We are continuing our unit on comprehension strategies. Students are practicing summarizing, questioning, inferencing, and connecting and they are tracking their thinking using post it notes or the Reader's Notebooks.
Encourage your child to keep index cards or post it notes inside their books to record their thoughts while they read. If they are a 3rd-5th grader, they can also access their Reader's Notebooks from home through our Google Classroom. They will simply go to www.classroom.google.com and log in.
Encourage your child to keep index cards or post it notes inside their books to record their thoughts while they read. If they are a 3rd-5th grader, they can also access their Reader's Notebooks from home through our Google Classroom. They will simply go to www.classroom.google.com and log in.
Math
All grade levels: In math, all grade levels will be working on explaining their reasoning and critiquing the reasoning of others in conjunction with the math content they are learning. Specifically, students will be solving word problems and working on restating and answering the questions and explaining what they did and why they did it. They will then share their work with others and use what they observed to inform how they might modify their work next time to continually improve.
Leadership
Leadership groups have now all gotten started with 4-H. Grades K-3 will be learning about the characteristics of leaders. Grades 4-5 will be learning about the characteristics of leaders and will also engage in a community service project.
General Intellectual
We have been working on critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking, while you're thinking, in order to make your thinking better. Critical thinking skills involve questioning, reasoning, and evaluating. Thus far, we have explored questioning and are now working on reasoning. All students have been exploring Scratch or Tynker, computer programming websites that engage them in reasoning/logic/problem solving to design a program. All students can access these programs for free from home.
Art, Creativity, Music, Dance, and Drama
2nd and 3rd Grade Art, Creativity, Music, and Drama group: We are working on creating a musical. Thus far, we have developed our storyline and we are in the process of creating our script, as well as our costume and set designs. This will be a long term, on-going project. We will have a performance of our finished product in the spring. I am excited to announce that we will also take a field trip (with parent permission) to see Peter Pan and get a backstage tour at the Lexington Children's Theater to get some ideas for how to do the production piece of our musical.
5th Grade Art: We have been working on self-selected, independent projects involving research on technique or art history combined with the creation of a piece of artwork.
Resources and Opportunities
Opportunities:
Kentucky Association for Gifted Education Annual Conference; February 27-28 at the Marriot Griffin Gate in Lexington (click here)