Kid-Created Google Earth Projects ~ Virtual Scavenger Hunts and More

See the KID-CREATED category for additional tutorials and projects that invite students to create original puzzles, presentations, events, and more. If your upper elementary or middle school students have enjoyed any of these Google Earth virtual scavenger hunts, it might be interesting to have them try to create their own as part of a unit … Read more

Open-Ended Triple-A Analogies ~ High Ceiling / Low Floor

Here is a math activity that can serve as a quick brain teaser or an ongoing whole-class activity to use throughout the school year. First, if you aren’t familiar with what I call Triple-A Analogies, watch the video tutorial below, first shared in this post. It’s a great place to start and you’ll find ready-to-share … Read more

Kid-Created Number Logic Problems ~ More Gus and Gabby

Recently, I had a chance to introduce a group of 3rd-grade GT students to the Gus and Gabby problems found HERE. After doing a set of problems, the students asked if they could create their own. They were reading my mind, and I loved that it was their idea! The process of creating their own … Read more

Spot the Difference: A Visual-Spatial Activity for K-2

Here is an activity that I used for enrichment with Kinder and 1st grade during a time when we were working on visual-spatial discrimination (In the P.E.T.S.™ curriculum, this is Max the Magician’s specialty). I was so surprised by the results! It had me wondering if this activity could even aid in identifying gifted kinder … Read more

Novel Study One-Pager ~  A Culmination Project (Gr 4 and up)

Do you do novel studies with your students? If so, this is a culminating project I can recommend for both general education and gifted classes, particularly in middle school. No doubt you’ve heard of one-pagers and may have even assigned them. You’ll find many great write-ups and resources listed below. I thought I’d share some … Read more

Virtual Reality Art- So Easy!

Now every teacher can do a VR project! Panoform provides an easy way to turn a 2-D (flat) piece of art into a 3-D VR experience! All you need to do is follow these three easy steps: STEP ONE: Download the BASIC GRID page found HERE on the Panoform website. It looks like this: STEP … Read more

Dear Santa, I Can Explain… ~ A Creative Letter-Writing Project

by Kaley Chick When I saw this creative project on Instagram, I reached out to the_gifted_chick, GT teacher Kaley Chick, and she graciously agreed to give us all the details in a guest blog post. Kaley is the PACE instructor for the gifted program with Minot Public Schools in Minot, ND, where she works with … Read more

Gnome for the Holidays ~ A Creative Writing Project for Any Season (3rd-5th)

by Helen Kumpel with Donna Lasher This festive project was created by Helen Kumpel, a GT teacher in Georgia. It would be fun to do anytime, but if you need a seasonal activity that doesn’t focus on any holiday at all – this is great! There are many ways to adapt this project to complement … Read more

The Science of Gratitude ~ Design Your Own Thanksgiving Challenge

In a previous post, I’ve shared about the “science of happiness,” and with the Thanksgiving holidays approaching in the U.S., it’s a great time to inspire kids to engage in creating their own scientific experiments related to having a gratitude attitude. SHARING THE SCIENCE Below are a few videos about gratitude experiments and studies done … Read more

Think Like an Archaeologist: Kid-Created Artifacts and a Mini-Excavation

As part of our year-long MYSTERIES unit in 4th-grade GT, we studied various sciences that solve mysteries and one was archaeology. The book Hands-On Archaeology was very helpful, but way too comprehensive for the time we had to devote to this mini-unit, so we focused on big ideas, the language of the discipline, and methods … Read more