Wise Ones Australia

WiseOnes 13th Annual Conference

Topic: Transition issues your child might face in moving from Primary to Secondary school

Session 1 at 9.30am. Supporting parents of children in years 3 to 5 in their decision making about this important stage of life. What are the likely issues? Guest speaker: Vanessa Reynolds G&T Coordinator Box Hill High School. Vanessa has the COGE from UNSW and a Post Grad Cert in Gifted Ed from Monash and is the mother of a gifted child. The combination of academic qualifications and human experience makes her a great speaker for us.

Gifted Services Association formed

While at the 11th Asia-Pacific Gifted Conference in Sydney I spoke to Maxine Cowie of Starjump about the need to form a professional, non-profit association of service providers for the gifted. Many are known to you through the Gifted Resources Organization run by Jo Freitag but all of us have been working separately and without knowing each other much. I think professional people need collegiality to be more effective overall in the services we provide and Maxine agreed. WiseOnes and Starjump formed the GSA on the spot and since then we have more members, Emma Donaldson from Victoria, Helen Dudeney from NSW and Sue Luus from Queensland. Our website is www.giftedservices.asn.au. You may wish to use it occasionally to see what is available to help you and your fast learner children. We are complementery to each other. WiseOnes works with schools providing additional programs for those with top 5% potential. You can see about the others at the GSA website.

Vikings Unit

We really enjoyed our Scandinavian trip to several Vikings Museums. WiseOnes now has several new resources for this unit as well as many mini-movies for the WiseOnes teachers to choose from to support the lesson plans. The children at Boronia Heights will gain from these in term 4 and others later. We also made some mini-movies to go with Knights & Castles and Climate Change units and bought some great models to complete the Anatomy unit I am working on now. That should be ready for next year. As a different thinker myself, I tend to create the learning units rather differently from most school learning.

Suzanne Hennah Schools

Suzanne Hennah

0411 807 000

Area Development Officer

info@wiseones.com.au

Schools

Teachers

Qualifications

B.Sc,Dip.Ed,Cert4

Term 1

Term 2

Term 3

Term 4

Watching television

An interesting observation was made recently at a Professional Development session I was attending. The gifted child watches 5 hours less television than the average child per week. Over a school life this amounts to a huge difference in learning time as they are often doing more learning in those 5 hours and getting more and more different from the average child. No amount of change in schools will overcome this increasing difference. Only a change in parent supervision can make that difference.

International Womens Day

I’d like to honour two women who had a significant effect on my life and therefore on WiseOnes. Australia’s first saint, Mary McKillop, founded a teaching group of women with the vision of educating the poor. I once visited a remote aboriginal community, in a stony desert area in West Australia, as far from anywhere else as you could get, and there were two of her group, living in an ancient caravan and running a school so the influence of Mary McKillop three quarters of a century later was still felt. For me another amazing women was Sr Edmund, probably born after Mary’s death, but who was filled with Mary McKillop’s vision and with a great sense of humour. Sr Edmund taught me in Grade 5, recognized my potential, organized free psychological assessent, coached me for free after school towards gaining a scholarship. I passed the scholarship that year so missed grade 6 and also Grade 7. After a very hard year doing grade 8 , I gained a government scholarship and completed years 9 to 12. For several years only one other girl from my primary school at Frankston completed year 12. I found out later that my parents had gone without food to pay my train fare to secondary school. Yes, I do appreciate that parents make sacrifices to provide the WiseOnes program for their fast learners.

Read more on International Womens Day…

MySchool reports

I averaged the Victorian ICSEA scores of all schools that has the WiseOnes program in 2009. The average was 1095 with a range of 1005-1194. The two extremes of the range were both in the outer east of Melbourne. I wonder how much help we have been to these schools in assisting their fast learners to be happy, confident and able to achieve good results. Many would anyway, but confidence in being your own true self certainly helps and the extra, advanced general knowledge and advanced learning skills must make a difference. We do hear of children who are in WiseOnes getting scholarships but have no means of tracking them later. I am keen to make the program available in schools with lower scores, as school leaders tell me it makes a difference, but parents can’t afford it and schools can’t afford it. I am seeking a big corporate sponsor that we could work with as a partner. Our ethical nature would need to be satisfied as one of the criteria. Pat S

Master Speller Mentor

We are very pleased with our first Master Speller Mentor. Her adult son has an intellectual disability and has not been able to spell before. Now , using the method accurately, he is learning two words a week when he comes to vist his parents. It is very exciting for all of us. The Mentor is not a teacher but a determined mother who is good at English. Contact us info@@wiseones.com.au if you think we could help you.

Commencing 2010

Welcome back everyone. Term dates for Victoria:- most schools start the WiseOnes program the week commencing February 8th. Make sure your fee is paid at the start of the school year to confirm your child’s place in the program as we have to prepare everything for the correct number of children. We do not use any of the school’s materials or resources other than a space. As term 1 is so short most schools will have two sessions at the start of term 2 then start that term’s unit straight after. In a couple of schools the teacher has negotiated finishing all 8 sessions in term 1 by holding a double session occasionally.

Why Nerds are Unpopular

Paul Graham wrote an article on this topic from an American viewpoint and I think the situations is similar in Australia but not yet so intense as in USA.
Point 1: Everyone in the school knows exactly how popular everyone else is. 2. Being smart seems to make you unpopular and your life difficult. 3. So, he asks,”Why don’t smart kids make themselves popular?” After all, they are smart enough to work out how to beat the system” 4. The asnwer he thinks is they don’t want to be popular enough. 5. Being popular takes a lot of time from other interests. It affects how you live and move and dress, how they exude charisma, and listen to music, attend films, watch videos, play sport, and use the internet etc etc. It takes a lot of time and basically the nerds want to be smart more than to be popular. Yes, they would like to be popular, but not enough to let their smartness run down. It is not a conscious decision at the school stage so they still feel bad about not being popular but they want more to make a difference, to counter wrongs, to design beauty, to write well, to understand people better, to program computers, to wonder and experiment and to read deeply and widely. Being smart enough to do all those things is more important than temporary popularity.