Activities for Challenging Gifted Learners by Increasing Complexity in the Common Core.

Gifted learners need opportunities for critical and creative thinking to stretch their minds and imaginations. Strategies for increasing complexity in the four core areas of language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies were addressed using the Common Core and Iowa Core Standards through several methods. Descriptive adjective object boxes were created, based on the themes of bees, surface area and volume, cultural beliefs and mummies, and bee colony collapse disorder. The sets of materials were used in various ways to increase the complexity of instruction in the core subject areas of literacy, mathematics, social studies, and science. The descriptive adjective boxes consisted of several small objects related to a theme with corresponding cards. This card set provided activities to increase the complexity of the topics. This document provides the content presented at the Iowa Talented and Gifted Association’s (ITAG) Annual Conference. Acknowledgements The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Center for Educational Transformation at the University of Northern Iowa and from the Verna and Raymond Smith Scholarship Fund used to support travel for the University of Northern Iowa faculty of the Education of the Gifted Division and five middle level education majors to attend a state conference addressing the needs of talented and gifted students. Introduction Too often, gifted students are overlooked in classrooms, even by well-intentioned teachers. Many teachers believe the myth that gifted students will reach their potentials on their own; or, teachers lack the time and skills needed to appropriately challenge the gifted. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act did not include legislation for the gifted. The educational initiative of Response to Intervention (RTI) is designed to remediate learning and behavior for learners who struggle. The current surge of interest in the common core may further harm the gifted because the standards are locked into grade level content (Schroeder-Davis, 2014). A mother of a gifted child shared her seven year old’s thoughts about teachers (Kottmeyer, C., 1997-2015, p. 1), “The teachers are really nice people, all of them. And I understand about other kids needing to learn. But sometimes I wonder – what about me, in terms of learning?” Most educators complete their college years with little to no instruction on effective teaching of gifted students. However, at the Midwestern university of the authors of this document, middle level education majors complete an online, week-long unit of instruction focused on gifted students. They learn about the characteristics of the gifted, begin to comprehend the diversity of this group of students, and complete activities designed to provide them tools for teaching gifted students. They learn how to compact curriculum so that learners skip parts of the curriculum they have already mastered to spend time on new learning instead. These preservice teachers also learn how to increase the complexity of lessons to meet the needs of high-achieving students. For the presentation at the Iowa Talented and Gifted Association (ITAG) conference on which this document focuses, five middle level education students used descriptive adjective object boxes that one of the professors had made and created several new sets of materials themselves. They added ideas of their own to increase complexity for elementary or middle level gifted learners. This document describes the contents of these effective learning materials, offers activities to enhance student understanding of the topics, and provides suggestions to increase the complexity to challenge highperforming students. Literacy: Increasing Vocabulary The materials described here assist students in increasing their descriptive vocabularies. After working with teacher-made materials, students could each be given a theme, and they could each assemble their own set of items related to the theme. Then, students would generate