Gifted Children Deserve Authentic Learning Experiences

Think back on the school year

What did your gifted child learn in school?  Did it relate to events in today’s world?  Did it offer food for thought?  Did it develop an engineering mind?  Did they engage in challenges that require persistence?  Were there authentic learning experiences, the kind of educational experiences that last a lifetime? 

 To engage children in this kind of education, you have to start with Big Ideas, ask questions, and let the students uncover the answers. The students have to be relied upon for the solutions to problems that arise, and their ideas have to be tried. They have to experience ideas that don’t work to create ideas that do work.

This is how we teach at Vanguard! 

We started with the Big Idea, change.  One of our projects involved how to change two-dimensional shapes into three-dimensional shapes. The class started building prisms with paper patterns. This activity caused them to be inspired and asked if they could make a sphere from 2-dimensional shapes, so they did!  Using a lot of recycled cardboard, they changed 2-dimensional triangles into a 3-dimensional geodesic dome.

The students measured, folded, and cut 75 triangles and screwed in all of the cardboard screws needed to attach the triangles together. When the screws did not hold, the students problem-solved and found that zip ties would do the job.  They realized the relationship between triangles, trapezoids, hexagons, and pentagons.

The class connected math to real-world applications when they saw an article from the local newspaper about the Buckminster House in Illinois, which is a geodesic dome.  When the dome was finished, the students’ pride in the authentic work they loved doing was evident to all.  They spoke with confidence to visitors about the process of building the dome and loved doing other learning activities inside their dome. 

The students measured, folded, and cut 75 triangles and screwed in all of the cardboard screws needed to attach the triangles together. When the screws did not hold, the students problem-solved and found that zip ties would do the job.  They realized the relationship between triangles, trapezoids, hexagons, and pentagons. In the construction process, the dome collapsed, sagged, and came apart multiple times. They brainstormed ideas to fix it.  Their minds and their muscles worked hard.  The students came to understand the importance of measuring accurately.