Phone: (03) 9794 8258WiseOnes 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.
Session 2 at 11.30 am Discussion of the 6 types of gifted children as found by Maureen Neihart, Psy D, Associate Professor and Head of Psychological Studies at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. Learn how to recognize your child in the spectrum. This will help teachers to understand why only two types appear gifted in class. Pat Slattery and the WiseOnes team.
How to cope with the usual pressures associated with each type. General discussion in small groups, then reporting to the whole on the major points raised in your group. Parents can help each other using their experiences. WiseOnes teachers will be in the groups to assist.
Venue: Waverley RSL Coleman Pde Glen Waverley Date: Sat. 23rd October Time: 9.30 to 12.30 . Registration Fee $30. Email info@wiseones.com.au for bank details for EFT( copy and paste email ). Please let us know if you would like lunch( extra cost). Minimum of 25 people needed for light lunch. Receipts supplied on the day.
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.
I think the fast learner children like the quirky and unusual and the fact that it is not all reading and books as resources but they can touch and feel and smell as well. They also like the fact that they can ask any questions on the spot when they think of them and not have to wait as they do in class. That’s why we only have 8 per group and partly why the cost of the program to schools means a significant contribution is needed from most families whose children are in the program. It is a unique difference from school planned gifted programs which usually have more than 20 children in them to meet teacher costs.
Suzanne Hennah Schools
| Suzanne Hennah | 0411 807 000 |  |
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| Area Development Officer | info@wiseones.com.au | ||||||
| Schools | Teachers |
B.Sc,Dip.Ed,Cert4 |
Term 1 | Term 2 | Term 3 | Term 4 | |
| Carrum | Please let us know | Engineering | Expert on Shells | ||||
| Frankston | if you would like to | ||||||
| Langwarrin | hear about our support | ||||||
| Somerville | program for fast learners | ||||||
| Pearcedale | 12+ years of support | ||||||
| Mt Eliza | in Victoria | ||||||
| Seaford | |||||||
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.
Recently the parent of an 8 year old told me that her gifted daughter went to a birthday party and did not understand what was going on. The whole party was so commercialized from television that she and another girl did not get the sexualized references, the advertising language and the fashion agenda. The parent wondered if she should expose her daughter to more of these things so she could fit in. However when I told her about the research she felt reassured about her choices. Many parents of gifted chidlren do the same and wonder how it is affecting their child. They do not need to worry. Good parenting always helps a child. The only time it is negative is when the child is not encouraged to do things for him or herself when they could do it. They need to learn to be independent in safe areas appropriate for their common sense level. I have seen parents carrying the bag of an 8 year old. It is not being kind or loving; it is being overprotective. One thing that children need to understand is that a family is a micro community and everyone has to put in according to their abilities, to make it work really well. Then they learn respect for other people and their abilities, and they grow in confidence and feel good about their contribution to the common wealth.
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.
So now you know why all WiseOnes Education Managers agree to provide a scholarship, from their own resources, to poor families with fast learner children. In the 12+ years so far that would be one scholarship per term per school for all WiseOnes schools, or 49 times the number of schools, well over 1500 scholarships and still going. Thank these two amazing women teachers, Mary McKillop and Sr Edmund, whose passion for justice and equity in education and in opportunity for the future, combined with disciplined hard work and self sacrifice still lives on. Mary has been dead for over 100 years and I’m sure Sr Edmund must be dead too, but their influence is still here. There must be many others, inspired by their ideals, who are doing great things in our communities.
I’d like to express my appreciation of all the wonderful teachers who have worked and are workng with WiseOnes. Their contribution to the welfare of those who are difficult to provide for in schools, ought to be recognized. There is a great deal of unusual preparation in the work of a WiseOnes teacher but also great satisfaction and pleasure. Please thank your WiseOnes teacher this week. Pat Slattery
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.
Im NSW the term goes a week longer so most will be able to complete the unit in term 1. Easter Sunday is 4th April.
Remember that your gifted child needs to enrol in the ‘hard” units as well, in order to learn to fail, to ask for help, to oversome perfectionism, to see that risk taking to learn is OK and to learn to make wise decisions about the effort that is required to attain the result they want at that time, for that work. In this way WiseOnes helps them cope with their gift, to prevent stress and to avoid later complications that often arise from the very nature of being gifted. We are not an academic enrichment program but a differentiated personal development program with Academic, Intellectual, Moral and Social aims specifically to help the gifted child from our own educational learning and the shared wisdom of our team of wonderful educators. Pat S
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.
As I see it they are more mature at the same age and they are able to see the big picture and take long term stances and plan long term actions. Given that the average nerd learns at 140% the rate of an average person, by their teens they are years ahead in their thinking. Judging them against others their own age does not make sense. In Australia it is quite similar to this. One of our daughters, a tall girl, was celebrating her 11th birthday. My tennis partner said, “How old is she today?” I said,’She’s 11.” My partner said “Thank goodness. I always thought she was bit on the slow side as I imagined she was about 16.” And this about a girl whose Geography teacher said when she was actually 16, “She is the most gifted student I have ever taught.” She had been underestimated due to her choices and her height. I am always amazed at how much nerds know when given the chance to show it in a non-threatening environment.