Carpe diem! These are the words that greet my students daily as they enter our classroom. Every day, my students rise to the challenge and truly seize the day! I aim to create an environment filled with creativity, educational challenges, happiness, and self-awareness.
My students attend a Title I public school in New York City, where nearly all students come from low-income households.
My students are a diverse group of intellectually gifted fourth graders. Their interests are unique and varied, yet they share the trait of innate inquisitiveness. Our classroom is a place of discovery and inquiry. We strive to tap into our higher-order thinking skills daily, pushing ourselves to explore and think deeply.
My Project
One of my biggest mandates as an educator of gifted students is to enrich the curriculum at every given opportunity. To that end, I design and implement many year-long Project Based Learning studies to broaden my students' perspectives regarding history and the world around them. For example, my class will undertake a political study where we will delve into the topics of government and public policy. The aim is to inspire students to become actively involved in all aspects of citizenry. The culminating activity of our study will be for students to conduct their own mock presidential campaign. The students will form parties and assume all roles, ranging from candidate to campaign manager to speech writers. The parties will devise their own platforms that address issues deemed important. The requested chairs will complement the table we were lucky enough to have funded through a previous grant and provide a place for the children to meet in small groups while working in their Project Based Learning Cooperative groups.
Not only will the requested furniture be used during our political study, but my students will also utilize it in a plethora of ways.
Cooperative group work is a constant in our classroom. Regardless of the subject area and task, the students are given creative control over how their findings are presented. I will also use this as a meeting area to pull small groups to work with in terms of remediation, as well as for enrichment. The furniture will go a long way in helping us to make our classroom more functional, as well as make it more like our second home.
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