Vanguard's Unique School Model
Welcome to Vanguard Gifted Academy’s educational blog. This is installment six in our series Selecting the Best School for Your Gifted Child. I’m Elizabeth Blaetz, Head of School at Vanguard Gifted Academy. Today, I’m going to tell you about Vanguard’s program for gifted education.
Matching Learners to Peers
At Vanguard, we are very unique in that we do not assign our children a grade level; we don’t have first, second, third or fourth grade. Our children are in mixed-age groups, and we have two sections: a Band 1 section (primary) and a Band 2 section (intermediate). This allows for gifted children to be with both intellectual and social-emotional peers.
Understanding Enrollment
To enroll in Vanguard Gifted Academy, we use both IQ testing and a day-long visit. We find that IQ testing alone doesn’t give us enough information about your child, and when they come to visit us, it is such a wonderful experience for us to understand your child. Practically, this visit gives some perspective to the IQ testing scores. These two together give us a complete picture of your child as a learner.
If your child comes to Vanguard and there’s a problem — if we see something in the testing that signals your child would benefit from other services — we’ll recommend them. Perhaps they would be better served in the public school setting, maybe due to their social-emotional situation. In other cases, it’s a personality interaction situation where some social work would help. We might recommend that you go to your public school first and get those services and then come to Vanguard because those are services we don’t offer. But if your child is eligible, we will take them at any age. We serve children from kindergarten through fifth grade, but we’re also flexible about enrollment. Children do not have to be five years old to enroll in Vanguard. We have had some very wonderful four-year-old children who were so ready to learn. It would be detrimental to them to make them wait a whole year to come.
The Two-Component School Day
Our program has two components. We start off our mornings by doing skill-building activities. This is when we get into our reading groups and do our math activities.
It doesn’t matter how old you are; it matters what you’re ready to learn.
Everybody who’s ready to learn long division learns long division, for example. In the morning, they’re building their skills and learning at their learning level with mixed-age peers.
In the afternoon, we shift into what we call S.T.R.E.A.M., which is science, technology, reading and research, engineering, art and math. This is the hands-on learning that gifted children love and when we take the skills from the morning and apply them to big ideas. This is a time of exploration and depth-learning when students further understand how the concepts and skills they learned in the morning can apply to real-life situations.
A Gifted-Specific Program
The Vanguard program is a whole-child program. We work with the idiosyncrasies of gifted children in order to help them understand who they are and how they personally grow.
But our program is not meant for average children who are high-achievers. We find, because of the open-ended learning that takes place, that they are often very lost.
Every teacher in our building has lots of experience with gifted learners and gifted education, and they’re flexible and able to work with these kids. Our teachers just thrive when they’re with gifted children. The student-to-teacher ratio in our school is about ten to one. This small student-to-teacher ratio is essential for gifted learners, especially when you’re taking care of both that social-emotional gifted child and the general idiosyncrasies that come with gifted learners.
One Hundred Percent Gifted Instruction
One hundred percent of the day is gifted learning. Our teachers personalize their teaching so that each child can learn at his or her own level. One other thing that’s important when teaching younger (and older) gifted learners is filling in the gaps. Gifted kids tend to jump over learning in some areas, and when they jump over something, they have a hole in their education. It’s imperative that you find those holes and fill them in to build a strong foundation for their learning.
Our math instruction ranges from kids working on an average level to those working three to four levels above their grade level. We personalize the program in order to serve their learning needs. One of the things that stands out about Vanguard Gifted Academy is how we teach children to be successful for themselves. When there are challenges, we show our learners how to work through them independently.
Finding a Route to Success
How do you find the route to success? That’s different for every child. We let them come up with and then test their own strategies. If they don’t work, we help them by developing strategies that give them a route to success; we help them learn to advocate for themselves, evaluate themselves, and overcome perfectionism to help them reach a much more productive learning style.
Thank you so much for reading through our series Selecting the Best School for Your Gifted Child. I hope that you’ve enjoyed discovering different types of programs for gifted children and that it has helped you as you go out and look for the right fit for your gifted child. If you enjoyed learning about Vanguard’s unique school model but missed earlier entries, start by reading our blog on the need to know your child before choosing a school for them.