Book Off to Publisher!

Finally!  After over six years developing the curriculum and over one year writing it all down, I am finished.

In my life before sabbatical, I taught gifted children.  I loved the freedom of the curriculum.  Gifted education still allowed teachers to build on their strengths and the students' interests.  Until two years ago, that is.  Two years ago, due to principals' complaints and needy parents, the county required the teachers of the gifted to get together and create county-wide curriculum for all of the gifted pull-out program (grades 1-5). I'm all for standards, but what happened to creativity in education?

When the teachers met, we all brought our favorite units to the table.  I am a very flexible teacher and like teaching new things so I didn't have any set units that I wanted to keep.  The only curriculum I really wanted to keep teaching was my interest projects.  So I brought several student samples of interest projects and presented my original curriculum to all of the teachers of the gifted and the coordinator of the county gifted program.  Their reaction was wonderful!  They loved it and several encouraged me to write it up and try to get it published.

So that spring I started writing and by September, I sent prospectuses to eight different publishers of gifted educational curriculum.  After a couple of months and a couple of kind rejections, I had an offer to publish by Royal Fireworks Press out of New York.  I had never heard of them, but was elated.  Of course, in the back of my mind I wondered how much they were going to charge me to publish my book.  I was ready to sign the contract anyway, but I wanted to wait til I had heard from the other publishers.

Good thing I waited because by February I had a contract from a very well known gifted publisher, The Critical Thinking Company.  And on July 12, I emailed them my final manuscript! (I won't go into the trouble I had converting the 111 pages from Apple's Pages into Microsoft Word.  Yeesh...)  And to think that my book is about teaching technology!  What was I thinking?

If you're interested in knowing what my curriculum is about check out my book's blog.  I don't know if the book will be successful or not, but right now it just feels so good to have finished something I started!

Wyatt's World at SIG

Hi!  Wyatt here...

This summer I went to a three week camp at Emory University.  I took 5 different classes there.

My first period was spying. It was so fun! I learned how to fool a lie detector and went on a big mission all around campus.

My second period was self defense. It was taught by Matthew Schwab and he is a real judo teacher. He has a judo school thingy in Midtown. We learned different throws and pins. It was so cool!

Third period was gaming. It is taught by Mrs. Brooks (a.k.a. My Mom). We did lots of games such as.....
parkour, mancala, chess, quiddich for muggles ( I was the seeker - see pic), scratch game making thing(bet you don't know what that is.) and senet. It was one of my favorite classes.

I caught the snitch in Quidditch for Muggles!

Then, lunch ... lunch lunch lunch. On most days we go to the DUC(Dobbs Univevsity Center) which is a buffet with things like a salad bar, sandwitch making spot, and ice cream!! On Wednesdays, however, we go to Cox Hall where they serve chick fil a, pizza hut, dooley's( buffulo wings and burgers), a mexican place, sushi, smoothies, and krispie kreme donuts.

Well then my fourth period was fencing. It was fun. We learned different moves like an advance, a retreat, a lunge, an advance lunge, a bolestra and other stuff. It was so fun. I got second place in the final tornament and there were 14 year olds! (I'm only 10.)

My 5th class was going to court. We learned stuff about court and we did a trial where the crime was someone in our class kidnapped Justin Bieber!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

After classes we did rec hour. It is basicly recess. We would pick out an activity to do like basketball, field and lounge. Then after that commuters go home. It was really fun.

SIG Happens

Wyatt and I have been SIG campers for a week now.  He is loving every minute of it and I am finally feeling like I can breathe.  While he enjoys the stimulation of a multitude of new classes and material he has never seen before, I am struggling to create lessons for classes I have never taught before.

Even though I am unsure of my curriculum, I love the SIG methodology for teachers!  It gives you so much freedom to meet the objectives of the teacher and the student without having to worry about a stupid state test.   Basically, I create objectives for the course and then the student creates a personal objective.  We meet and discuss how the activities created by the teacher and chosen by the student can meet all objectives.  How empowering for the student and the teacher!  This week has almost made me like teaching again... Almost.  But I still hate the hours.

The four classes I am teaching are Word Power, Gaming through the Centuries, SIG Apprentice, and Thinking Outside and Beyond the Box.

Word Power is basically expanding the student's vocabulary by researching and using Latin and Greek root word derivations.  I have introduced them to Sarah Kay and the power of spoken word poetry.  She was a hit!  If you haven't heard of her, check out her Ted Talk: Sarah Kay Ted Talk  We'll be using their root word derivations dictionaries to create many new products from their Word Power Menu over the next two weeks.

I have Wyatt in my class for Gaming through the Centuries.  This is a new class to SIG so I really got to come up with my own idea of what the class should be.  I started this week with ancient board games - learning how to play the game as well as why each culture created a particular game.  I think the anthropology lessons in this class are more interesting than just learning new games.  The first thing I noticed about the gifted kids in this class is that they may know a lot about playing games, but they do not know anything about gamesmanship.  So while teaching them Senet, Mancala, and Chess, I have had to work very hard to teach them that when playing a game someone is going to lose.  You win some, you lose some.  Deal with it!  Wyatt likes to win as much as anyone, but he has always handled losing well.  Since he was very small we started a rule in our home: the winner puts the game away.  Trust me, no winner gloats for very long while putting tiny pieces back correctly.  If you would like to learn about ancient board games, check out this link: Ancient Board Games  Next week, we look at ancient and modern sports.  I have planned a quidditch match for next Friday so say a prayer for me!

SIG Apprentice has been so much fun!  I get to be Donald Trump and give my 6 young business women competitions to see who gets to be the Apprentice and who hear's, "You're Fired!"  This week's competitions were "Pulling the Strings," "Eco-Friendly Photo Debate", and "Picture Frame Business Plan."  Pulling the strings is a cooperative learning lesson for team building where teams must work together pulling strings attached to a pen to play tic-tac-toe.  Very funny and revealing about personalities right off the bat.  The photo debate idea came to me as I was walking around the Emory campus and seeing signs everywhere about how "Green" Emory is.  I thought we should put it to the test.  I sent one team with their phone cameras to find all signs of eco-friendly practices on campus and the other team to find all signs of waste.  It was a close debate, but waste won, unfortunately.  These high school students really impressed me with our last competition of the week.  Teams created and mass produced a picture frame design and then created a business plan for their new company.  I feel very good about our future business leaders.  Their presentations were awesome!  If you'd like to see where we are:   Emory Campus Tour

My last class of the day is Thinking Outside and Beyond the Box.  I love teaching this class!  It has been so much fun sharing creative thinking strategies and new perspectives with these young gifted minds.  I even got to impress them with my own adventure into inventing when I showed them my Full Bathtub Website.  We will have our own invention convention before the end of camp.  I can't wait to see what creative ideas these kids come up with!  How creative are you?  Try the exercises I did in class: Creative Thinking Exercises

Hope I have wowed you with SIG!  Next, I'll let Wyatt tell of his impressions so stay tuned!

First SIG, then Sabbatical

Wyatt at SIG with Emory's mascot- Dooley

First SIG, then Sabbatical!  First SIG, then Sabbatical!  This is my new mantra... this and Focus and Finish!  I am very distracted by other committments which has made me extremely grumpy and not a fun person to be around.  I am trying to tackle one thing at a time to prevent adult onset ADD.  So now do my new mantras make sense?

This sabbatical year is about new adventures and breaking out of the same old routines.  I have never taught summer school much less taught at a summer camp for the gifted.  This is definitely a new regime.

How did I get myself into this you may ask? (Believe me, my husband has asked me that about a thousand times this past week.) It all started innocently enough.  While attending the National Association for the Gifted Children (NAGC) convention in Atlanta this past fall, I met the coordinator for the Summer Institute for the Gifted (SIG).  When I saw they had a camp at Emory University, I was interested in sending our son, Wyatt.  The coordinator suggested that I teach while Wyatt attends to off set the expense of the camp.  Great Idea!  But no way would I give up three+ weeks of the summer if I were starting back to teach the last week of July when pre-planning begins for teachers in Cherokee County.  When we decided to take our sabbatical leap of faith in April, I applied for a teaching position with SIG and registered Wyatt for the camp.  So here we are at orientation.

Classes begin tomorrow.

First SIG, then Sabbatical....