Teaching the Gifted in an Inclusion Classroom: Activities that Work

As the educational system extends its resources and efforts to help make schools and classrooms more accessible to handicapped and special education students, teachers are finding themselves overwhelmed with increased demands, overcrowding, and lack of adequate training in managing all the necessary demands of an inclusion classroom. Inadvertently, instructional time and resources are often taken away from gifted children. Jam-packed with very successful ideas and activities that the author has used in her 37 years of teaching gifted students, this resource guide contains field-tested activities that have excited and worked for all educational levels. It offers educators and parents the best of all worlds, containing educational activities and competitions not just for the gifted child, but for all children. After a preface and an introduction, this book is divided into the following 35 chapters: (1) Accelerated Reader; (2) Angels in Action; (3) Brainstorming; (4) Bringing Shakespeare's Meter Alive; (5) The Callard-Szulgit Star Excellence; (6) Cloze; (7) Creative Problem Solving (CPS); (8) Diversity of Life; (9) "Finding Forrester"; (10) Fostering Brilliance; (11) Four Popular Questions with Commonsense Solutions; (12) Future Problem-Solving Program; (13) Hearing the Song without Right or Wrong; (14) I Am Poems; (15) The International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program; (16) Let's Get Real: National Academic Competition; (17) "Little Man Tate"; (18) Lunch Bunch; (19) Math Question of the Day, or "MQ of D"; (20) Mindbenders; (21) Modifying a Thesis: Watching One Idea Evolve into Something Else; (22) National Geographic Bee; (23) Newbery and Caldecott Award-Winning Books; (24) Place-Value Games; (25) The President's Fitness Challenge; (26) Project Success Enrichment; (27) Reading Counts: Book Talk; (28) School-Related Studies (SRS); (29) Scripps National Spelling Bee; (30) Speak to Me about Being Gifted...; (31) SQ3R; (32) The Stock Market Game; (33) Survivor in English 7; (34) Tiny Worlds; and (35) Web Quests and the Gifted. Appended are: (1) Professional Associations and Advocacy Groups; (2) Contests; and (3) Grants and Awards. Information about the author; a list of references; and a list of recommended readings are also included.