K-2+Nurturing

K-2 Nurturing Component //Harrison Isear's I spy project // The Gifted Specialist will make weekly classroom visits to provide whole a group lesson to encourage critical, creative, and higher order thinking skills. All activities are hands-on and address multiple intelligences. Thinking skills include convergent and divergent thinking, spatial and non-verbal reasoning, evaluation, analysis, and problem solving. Each lesson will last about 30 minutes.

“HOT Seats” (Higher Order Thinking Skills) will be set up in your child’s classroom to broaden and develop the targeted thinking skill after each character is introduced in the P.E.T.S. program. Visit the grade level sections to the left to access various enrichment materials to encourage thinking skills at home.

Primary Education Thinking Skills (P.E.T.S.) Students begin their adventure in Crystal Pond Woods by meeting Dudley the Detective. He is one of the six characters the students meet this year. Dudley uses convergent/deductive thinking skills as he uses clues to find the one and only one right answer. The students practice solving mysteries by listening to clues. They also analyze attributes to find their way along a path through Crystal Pond Woods.

After Dudley, students met Isabel the Inventor. She is the opposite of Dudley. Isabel likes to brainstorm to find lots and lots of right answers through divergent/inventive thinking. The students have fun making their "brainfocals" so they can see things in new and different ways. You might have noticed the funny looking shapes that were transformed into familiar objects! They also play a brainstorming game with shapes and different settings.

Next the students in 1st grade meet Sybil the Scientist. Sybil likes to study the parts of things using convergent/analytical thinking. We practice sorting and classifying with Sybil by examining the creatures Sybil discovers while at the Crystal Pond Woods softball game. Students use their magnifying glasses to sort these creatures into 4 cages. They examine the number of antennae, number of eyes and legs, whether or not the creatures has stripes, dots or were solid, and the size of the creatures. Through other sorting extensions, the students learn to analyze the parts of things to create groups.

After Sybil, the students meet the writing character, Yolanda the Yarnspinner. Yolanda likes to use her imagination to weave wonderful stories using divergent/creative thinking. We work to make boring sentences more interesting by adding details and adjectives. We also play with words to write jokes. Make sure to laugh when your child asks you what you call a honeybee that tells jokes... a funnybee!

The fifth character in Crystal Pond Woods is Max the Magician. Max uses visual/spatial perception as he looks for patterns to find one solution that works. Students learn how to manipulate tangrams and pattern blocks as they study Max. Max is our nonverbal thinker.

Our sixth friend in Crystal Pond Woods is good 'ole Jordan the Judge. Jordan uses considerations to find the best answer. While Jordan is our last friend we meet, he is one of the most important. He is also the most difficult to learn. Jordan's evaluative thinking will help train the students to think before they make decisions- a lesson they will carry with them the rest of their lives. With Jordan we work through some basic decision making scenarios and then graduate to play the game Apples to Apples. In Apples to Apples, students must consider similarities and differences as they make decisions.