More/Less & Before/After Questions

More / Less List

Originally published in the New York Times, a More / Less List is a great illustrated way to look back at the previous year and look forward to the new year. What would you like to see more of in 2022? What needs to drop away? There could be some great discussions around the idea of resolutions, but also the imperfect idea of perfection. 

Before / After Questions

What comes after a funny joke?  What comes before you say, “I’m sorry.”  What comes before the Nobel Prize?  What comes after the new year?  What comes before the feeling of pride? Before / After questions not only elicit some interesting and creative answers but often interesting depth of thought. Have students come up with their own questions to keep the “ball” rolling.

List of Before / After Questions

Put your answer after each question.

What comes after a funny joke?

What comes before you say, “I’m sorry”?

What comes after the telephone rings?

What comes before the victory parade?

What comes after the electricity goes off?

What comes before pay day?

What comes after the explosion?

What comes before the marathon race?

What comes after you hear “Look out!”

What comes before you sign the contract?

What comes after you lose your car keys?

What comes before the cure for the disease?

What comes after the broken window?

What comes before the Nobel Prize?

What comes after the blender stops?

What comes before the opening curtain on stage?

What comes after a rainstorm?

What comes before the crowd gets angry?

What comes after a squeaking door?

What comes before the concert?

What comes before the hard feelings?

What comes after the invitations are sent?

What comes before the trophy is presented?

What comes after you sign your name on the line?

What comes before a book becomes a bestseller?

Create some of your own for us to try………

There: A Philosophy and Ethics Discussion Guide

There: A Philosophy and Ethics Discussion Guide 

A little girl pictures the future as a different place—a place called “There”.  Her questions echo many of the worries that all children have.  

This discussion guide is one of more than 200 offered by the Prindle Institute to introduce philosophy  and ethics using popular children’s books.

Tiered Assignments

Why Differentiate?

A differentiated classroom provides various avenues to acquiring content, to processing or making sense of ideas, and to developing products.  It means tailoring instruction to meet individual needs. Whether teachers differentiate content, process, format/products, or the learning environment, the use of ongoing assessment and flexible grouping makes this a successful approach to instruction. 

Differentiation for the Highly Able

Who is the student in your class that will progress the least this year?…  It may actually be your enrichment student.  For them, differentiation means:

• experiencing challenge, working hard and building grit
• increased engagement and motivation to learn
• strengthened well-being, self-esteem and sense of accomplishment

Tiered Assignments 

Tiered assignments provide differentiation by allowing students to work on the same content but at different levels of complexity and challenge. Content standards are met by all, but each individual student is challenged at the appropriate level – including the enrichment student! This helps to ensure optimal learning and engagement for all. Students get “just right” work, being pushed beyond what is easy or comfortable. The number of tiers can vary, but three is a good place to start. 

Steps in Developing Tiered Assignments

Carol Ann Tomlinson suggests ‘teaching up’, which she describes as “a practice of first planning a lesson that’s challenging for high-end learners and then differentiating for other learners by providing supports that enable them to access that more sophisticated learning opportunity.”  This approach, Tomlinson says, challenges advanced learners more than trying to pump up a “middling” idea—and serves other students better as well.

1. Identify what all students must learn.
2. Reflect upon assessments of students’ readiness levels, profiles, and interests.
3. Create a task that challenges most students, is engaging, and promotes understanding of key concepts / skills.
4. Vary task appropriately for students with fewer skills..
5. Create additional activities that are more complex, require more abstract thinking, and possibly use advanced resources and technology. Determine complexity of each activity to ensure tasks will challenge students needing enrichment.
6. Ensure each student participates in a variation of the activity that corresponds to that student’s needs and readiness. 

( from Differentiation: Simplified, Realistic and Effective by Bertie Kingore, 2004 )

‘TIERING UP’ AND THE HIGHLY ABLE STUDENT:

• Allows highly able students to skip “kill and drill” and lowers frustration with “doing school”
• Can involve students in co-designing of tasks 
• Allows a faster pace for work, or perhaps a slower pace to allow for more depth and complexity (fewer, but more complex tasks)
• Focuses on abstract concepts as much as possible and uses open-ended questions 

Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Thinking outside of the box takes practice. You’ll find students get better at creative problem solving after practicing their lateral thinking skills. Here are some good riddles to start with.  Try them in small groups so students can share their thoughts. 

• Lateral Thinking Puzzles
• 31 Tricky Lateral Thinking Puzzles (with Answers) – IcebreakerIdeas

Smart is not Easy

SMART is not EASY

This list was adapted from the blog, “12 Things I Wish I Had Known About My Young Gifted Kids.”   For the full, awesome, original article, visit: https://www.smartisnoteasy.com/blogs/post/12-Things 

Gifted programs are not elitist. They are essential for social justice. 

Gifted kids have significant special needs – perfectionism, intensity, sensitivity, higher incidence of learning differences, misunderstood by teachers and peers – and those needs deserve to be addressed.

The point is developing grit and growth mindset, not achievement

Schoolwork needs to be hard enough for gifted kids to have to put forth real effort, so that they develop grit, growth mindset, persistence, perseverance, tolerance for mistakes, and a solid work ethic. Those life skills matter more than any single subject taught in K-12 schools. To build those skills with a gifted kid, we need to provide them with additional depth and complexity, so that school is actually challenging. 

Stealth disabilities are common

Gifted kids with a disability, learning difference, or other neurodiversity are called “twice exceptional” or 2e for short. When a 2e kid is in a too-easy classroom, they may be able to compensate so thoroughly for a disability that it becomes nearly invisible. Sometimes they are working so hard to compensate, that they don’t appear to be gifted either.

Perfectionism / Risk Avoidance

Kids who struggle with perfectionism seldom hand in perfect work. Instead, they avoid doing the work. They procrastinate. They have trouble making decisions, because they aren’t sure which is the right answer. They are impatient with others who aren’t “doing it right.” They melt down at the first sign of trouble. They are super sensitive to criticism. They are afraid to try. What’s really going on? They are dodging any chance of making mistakes. Perfectionism is about avoiding risk. And long term, that risk avoidance can snowball and become an even bigger problem. Helping kids learn to take appropriate risks, tolerate frustration, and get up and try again is an important life goal, and it takes lots of practice.

They need peers

Gifted kids have more sophisticated conceptions of friendship earlier than typically developing children, but may not have the practical social skills to go along with it. And all kids, typically developing or gifted, go through crucial social development stages that are all about “friends who are just like me.” Without access to other similar peers, it’s no wonder why some gifted kids’ social development gets pretty bumpy.

Smart kids don’t have it easy

Whether it’s perfectionism, sensitivity, intensity, existential angst, imposter syndrome, multipotentiality, or more – there’s a lot for gifted kids to manage that goes far beyond academics. People assume that gifted kids will be successful without help, and that gifted kids are overachievers in every area. But that is rarely true. The vast majority of gifted kids have uneven, asynchronous development, and have unique challenges in their social-emotional development.

Financial Literacy: Opportunity Cost

Stephen Punwasi is my favourite person on Twitter. And whenever he does a thread, I think, gosh, I wish I could teach this to my students. So here is one of his threads on Opportunity Cost.

I have turned it into a slide show here. (If the images don’t match, that’s a misinterpretation on my part.)

Other Financial Literacy Resources

Financial Literacy: Income vs Property Tax

Stephen Punwasi is my favourite person on Twitter. And whenever he does a thread, I think, gosh, I wish I could teach this to my students. So here is one of his threads on Income Tax vs. Property Tax.

I have turned it into a slide show here. (If the images don’t match, that’s a misinterpretation on my part.)

And here is a worksheet on Income Tax.
Government of Ontario website on Property tax; www.ontario.ca/page/property-tax
Government of Canada website on Income Tax: www.canada.ca/en/services/taxes/income-tax/personal-income-tax.html
Government of Canada website on Tax FAQs and 101s, and student worksheets

Other Financial Literacy Resources

Return on Investment (ROI) – More than just a financial concept (Opportunity Cost)

In financial terms, the return on investment (ROI) is a calculation used in business used to determine whether a proposed investment is wise, and how well it will repay the investor.

A similar concept is Opportunity Cost, the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. When economists refer to the “opportunity cost” of a resource, they mean the value of the next-highest-valued alternative use of that resource. If, for example, you spend time and money going to a movie, you cannot spend that time at home reading a book, and you can’t spend the money on something else.

Opportunity Cost = Return on Most Profitable Investment Choice – Return on Investment Chosen to Pursue.

If you are comparing 2 options, use opportunity cost. If you want to know if your money is well spent, use ROI.

We can also use ROI to evaluate our purchases. This can be harder to do.

• For example, what is a better use of our money: a $2 toy from the dollar store, or $15 binder for organizing your school work? A new car or a used car? These are not simple, straightforward calculations and have many variables, like how long you plan to keep them for.  
• Here’s a tough one: 4 years of university versus 4 years of working? Short-term pain, long-term gain? Or vice versa?

In life, we can look at ROI to determine how well our time is spent. For example, what is the ROI on a walk outside on our mental health? What do we spend a lot of time doing, but don’t get much out of? Or worse, comes with an emotional cost? As you can see, this becomes a philosophical question and way of evaluating our life choices.

• Try thinking about this concept in your classroom: which actions have the greatest payoff, and which actions come at a cost?

After discussing this concept with your class, ask them the following questions:

• What is something that comes at a high cost but has a high payoff?
  E.g., university?  A well-used gym membership? A house? A family?
• What actions or purchases come with a low or negative ROI?
  E.g., purchases of something you don’t use much (stuffed  toys, collectibles)? Procrastinating?

Spark their curiosity with “The Kids Should See This!”

“The Kid Should See This™ is a growing library of smart & super-cool, ‘not-made-for-kids, but perfect for them’ videos that can be watched in the classroom or together at home. Enjoy 8-12 new videos each week, and search 3,000 plus videos in the archives!  The video topics cover a variety of topics in science, art, animation, music, food, nature, space and technology!  

What we like about this site is the variety of videos that spark student curiosity!  It is a place where students can be encouraged to ask questions, talk or write about their opinions or be the start to some kind of research or experimentation!  The videos are designed to excite students to want to learn more! 

(Thanks Mrs. Wunder for this resource)

National Geographics Kids – Explorer’s Mindset

National Geographic Kids

National Geographic Kids is filled with lots of fun activities for kids to explore. Options to try:

Explorer’s Classroom!

In these unprecedented times where change and disruption seem to dominate routine, National Geographic is navigating ways to support, nurture, and care for learners and the educators who reach them.  The good news is that there are many engaging and fun ways to learn at home. We invite you to explore these collections of activities that have been curated for educators, parents, and caregivers to implement with K–12 learners.

Activities to try!

1. Pick a country to learn about and compare and contrast to Canada.
2. Attempt a try-at-home science experiment and report on how it went and what you learned.
3. Pick an “Amazing Animal” to explore and share your most fascinating insights. 
4. Come up with your best solutions to “Save the Earth”
5. Challenge students to watch one video that interests them and share with the class their most interesting facts!  
6. Learn about space. If you were a planet, which one would you be and why? Try this planet personality quiz
7. Check out these Best Jobs Ever! Which one would you want to be?