TAG Tidbits

We were thrilled to welcome our students back to TAG this week! Please see the schedule below to see which day your child will come for TAG Day in the 2024-2025 school year. Students will come to TAG after morning meeting on their scheduled day. The only required supply for TAG this year is a two pocket folder. Don't forget to send one in next week if you haven't done so already. We will use these folders to store all of our unit work, which will then be sent home at the end of each unit along with progress reports.

Monday - 1st Grade with Ms. Anderson OR 2nd Grade with Mrs. Share

Tuesday - 4th Grade with Ms. Anderson OR Mrs. Share

Thursday - 3rd Grade with Mrs. Share OR Ms. Anderson

Friday - 5th Grade with Ms. Anderson, Mrs. Share, OR Mrs. Daneke

This year, we will continue sending out a weekly newsletter on Thursday afternoons to keep our amazing TAG families in the loop with what's going on in our TAG units. Our newsletter will include information about the week's lessons, a peek at what's to come next week, pictures of our scholars hard at work (and having fun!), and any important announcements that need to be shared throughout the year. Let's have another great year in TAG!

This week, we kicked off our first unit of the year, Where in the World, and we were so excited to learn that this unit will take us on a trip around the globe (while using our geography skills) to learn about the art, food, and culture of various countries. We began the day by reviewing the seven continents before learning about the importance of passports to world travel. Next week, we will set up our own "passports", which we will use to collect "stamps" each week throughout the unit as we travel to different countries. Next, we reviewed the SCAMPER brainstorming process, which we then used to help us design a new suitcase for traveling the world. When we SCAMPER, we make small changes to existing ideas to come up brand new iterations. Students were presented with a photo of a traditional suitcase and students brainstormed some very creative ways to design perfect suitcase! At the end of the day, we read a book called Everybody Cooks Rice to establish the idea that things like food can connect people all around the world. We even got to taste test some jasmine rice!

This week, 2nd Graders officially began our first unit of the year: Rainforests! We started our unit work with an inductive reasoning activity, in which students were given a series of rainforest-related terms. Working collaboratively, students were challenged to find ways to put the words into meaningful groups. When we introduce this strategy, we talk about how there is no right or wrong when it comes to sorting as long as they can justify how they grouped their words.

For our strategy work, we used the well-known story, The Great Kapok Tree, to introduce the concept of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest. We used a variety of strategies to introduce new vocabulary, including Bingo! We also used a world map to locate all of the tropical rainforests and discussed the climate of these areas.

Finally, students started their cover page for their reflection Journals. They will share information about the strategies and concepts they learn in these journals throughout the year.

This week, we kicked off our brand new unit - Museum Marvels! Students were exposed to a mystery item that was an Andy Warhol art piece of Brillo pad boxes, which we used to explore the question What is art? Next, we introduced a new strategy for making sense/meaning of new ideas and concepts called a Frayer model. When we use Frayer models, students think about ways in which a concept can be described using facts and characteristics, definitions, examples, and non-examples. This method can be used in just about any subject area and helps lead to a deeper understanding of a concept. Since part of our day was taken up with iReady testing, we will pick up the idea of what makes art and investigate it a little further next week. Students will engage in a decision-making activity, in which they will be presented with examples of art that have been traditionally accepted by the art community and decide upon the criteria that we can use to determine what would be considered art.

Our new endangered animals unit focuses on the root causes of extinction and what we can do to prevent critically endangered animals from going the way of the Dodo bird. Third graders began their day with a very unusual mystery item - a cassette tape! When we work with mystery objects, students practice the art of asking good questions. They make a hypothesis about what they think the mystery object is and come up with a series of questions that can be answered with yes/no answers to test out their theories. We talk about the importance of beginning with big, broad questions and then get more specific as we learn more about the object from questions that are asked.

We then learned how a Dodo bird is like a cassette tape, as both objects are now effectively extinct. After learning about the Dodo bird and how it became extinct, students completed a Metaphorical Expression activity, which is a skill that works with various types of analogies to get students to really empathize and connect with a topic. Direct analogies allow students to look for similarities and differences between two completely unrelated objects (a cassette and a Dodo bird). When working with personal analogies, students step into the shoes of an object (Dodo bird) and answer some thoughtful questions as if they were that object. The final type of analogy is called compressed conflict, where students look for a pair of adjectives that seem to fight each other, but that can both be used to describe the same object (i.e. The Dodo bird was once alive, but now it is extinct).

Next week, we will take a closer look at how species have been protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Calling all doctors! 5th graders received their acceptance into Mini Medical School this week and hit the ground running with a decision-making activity about the best way to stop the transmission of an airborne virus. In this unit, students will assume the role of doctors in training as they investigate and learn about the various body systems, along with the medical specialty that studies, diagnoses, and treats the systems. Each week, students will earn a "board certification" sticker for successful learning about the body system of the day.

After engaging in a fun Carousel Brainstorming activity to get our brains thinking about body systems, organs, and fields of medicine, students learned about 4 specific types of doctors: Pediatrician, Oncologist, Dentist, and Emergency Room Doctor. Next, students used this new learning and our decision-making strategy to decide which type of doctor is the "best". Whenever we practice this strategy, we always talk about how the criteria we create is the most important aspect of decision-making because it allows us to compare all of the options objectively, and how the best decision is not always our favorite one. Now that students are in fifth grade, the expectation is that they are able to create strong criteria with their partners without much teacher modeling. We then use these criteria as justification for our valid decisions.

Next week, students will begin their first "medical round" as we learn about the musculoskeletal system!

Our prototype supply stations are always in need of some supplies to support some of our design thinking and creative problem-solving projects. We would be happy to rescue the following items from your trash/recycle if you have them hanging around at home (pictured below). All items would need to be clean and dry before bringing them to school.

High-importance items have been noted with an asterisk*.

Email: andersondL@fultonschools.org
Website: https://tinyurl.com/npegifted
Location: 3055 Kimball Bridge Road, Alpharetta, GA, USA
Phone: (470) 254-2800
Twitter/X: @Ms_AndersonTAG

Email: ShareL@fultonschools.org
Location: 3055 Kimball Bridge Road, Alpharetta, GA, USA
Phone: (470) 254-2800

X (Twitter): @MrsShareNPE

Email: daneke@fultonschools.org

Location: 3055 Kimball Bridge Road, Alpharetta, GA, USA

Phone: (470) 254-2800