The More Able Gifted and Talented - practical activities to use in your classroom tomorrow!

Some practical ideas to use with students in "group 1" and those Exceptionally Able:

Casserole thinking

Set an idea as a homework for students to spend a week, or holiday, thinking about, reflecting on and pondering. The best thoughts and ideas can take time to grow.

Ideas Onion

Like an onion, an idea has many layers. Encourage students to probe, ask questions, and dig deeper, coming back with new layers to the idea.

ABC Questioning

Add – further detail and – What else?

Build - Explain – Why?

Contrast – contradict that point – How can you disagree with this?

Line Up Game:

•Students are given a category e.g. book, animal, person, landform, invention

•Each student has to select an example of this category

•The students then have to line up in an order e.g. most important/ significant/ dangerous

• The students have to justify their choice

Post It Game:

•Individually, Students have to write single words on post its to describe something e.g. a city, an author, an event. They need to have as many ideas as possible

•They can then share their post-its with their team, removing any replicated post-its

•The team have to decide on 3 categories under which to organise their post-its, and how to organise them within these categories

•The team have to justify their choice

Devil’s Advocate

Students have 1 minute to argue one side of a case. They then have to argue the opposite side

Counter-intuitive arguing

Students need to try to argue from the opposite side, or turn an argument on its head. Can they think sideways, or diagonally?

PMI:

Students are given an idea: what if humans could fly, what if we banned cars, what if school was voluntary. They need to come up with as many pluses, minuses, and interesting thoughts on this idea as possible. This could be played as two or more teams

Odd One Out:

Students are given 3 subjects e.g. Germany, Britain and France, or Red, Blue and Green. They have to find as many odd ones out as possible between 3. Again, this could be

Ideas Flow

In groups students need to generate as many ideas as possible no matter how improbable – it’s what leading Research and Development Teams do

Dialectic

Students come up with an idea: the thesis. Students come up with an opposite idea: the antithesis. Now they need to try to put the 2 together to get a better overall idea: dialectic

Ideas Mapping

What does the idea look like? Can students map it out? Does it have sides or a shape, or different layers?

Scaffolds

Aim is to wean them off eventually allowing us to scaffold up rather than scaffold down.

Starts of with sentence starters for both paragraphs. Then only one and they have to write their own. Then just key words. The support is taken off at your own judgement. Don’t make it too easy, we still need to challenge all.

More to come!

Paulina