5 Card Photo Stories & Inventing New Ways to Sled

Here are some of the things we did, This Week In Gifted.

5 Card Photo Stories

This week the Tuesday morning and both the Thursday classes played a game based on Five Card Flickr.  I showed the class the following five photographs (press play to scroll through images).



Then the students paired up and had five minutes to come up with a story that included all five of the photos in any order they wished.  This activity involves collaboration, creativity and presentation skills.  The variety and quality of stories was amazing!  We had one story involving a Russian spy (disguised as a the black dog) and James Bond's son (boy in the tunnel), another ended with the school bus running over the malevalent dog, one story explained why school buses are yellow (apparently they used to be red) and of course a number of stories involved the dog eating the cake :-)

Sliding Inventions

The Wednesday afternoon grade K - 2 class were "hired" by S⁴ (Slippery Snow Sleds and Sliders) to invent a new way for children to zoom down snowy slopes.  First we reviewed the current range of sleds and sliders that children use, then students paired up to brainstorm new sliding inventions.  Students illustrated how their invention would look and work in a variety of ways; some made drawings, some created Pivot animations, and others used Lego to construct their inventions. 

Online Brainstorm Session

The Tuesday and Thursday classes tried a different format for brainstorming this week.  We've done whole group brainstorming sessions and we've done small group sessions with one person recording the group's ideas on paper.  This week students tried brainstorming on a virtual bulletin board.  Students were generating ideas for new inventions.  In the coming weeks they will start to plan out their own inventions.