Teaching Strategies
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Choice, Pace, and Purpose: Gifted Students Shouldn’t Have to Wait for Their Next Assignment
This blog post explores why gifted students need choice, flexible pacing, and meaningful purpose in their learning. Instead of making fast finishers wait or giving them extra busy work, the #smithingifted model allows students to move forward through choice-based pathways, badges, portfolios, STEM, robotics, coding, research, and extension challenges. Gifted education is not about giving…
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Building a Coding & Robotics Continuum for Gifted Learners 🤖💡
This blog explains how the #smithingifted Coding & Robotics Continuum organizes STEM tools into a purposeful, 3-year learning pathway for 3rd–5th grade gifted students. Instead of using coding and robotics as random activities, the continuum helps students move from introduction to developing skills to strong, independent use across four nine-week cycles each year. It highlights…
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Adding Turing Tumble to the #smithingifted Curriculum
I am adding Turing Tumble to the fourth nine weeks of each year in the #smithingifted curriculum as a hands-on computational thinking milestone. Students work through twelve Google Sheets across 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, and Turing Tumble gives them something exciting to look forward to while reinforcing logic, perseverance, debugging, and problem-solving.
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Adding Cricut to the Gifted Classroom: Where Creativity Meets Innovation
This blog shares why Cricut is being added to the #smithingifted curriculum as more than just a craft tool. In the gifted classroom, Cricut can support creativity, design thinking, entrepreneurship, STEM, problem solving, and student voice. Although I have not used it with students yet, I am excited to introduce it as a way for…
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Stop Giving Every Gifted Student the Same Assignment: A Better Way to Differentiate
Discover how the #smithingifted curriculum transforms differentiation by allowing gifted students to learn at their own pace through four levels of challenge: Explorer, Engineer, Innovator, and Visionary. Instead of giving every student the same assignment or making advanced learners wait, this approach promotes student choice, independence, creativity, and authentic problem-solving. Learn how self-paced learning, badge-based…