KES Gifted & Talented Newsletter

• End of Year GT Progress Reports will be sent out at the end of May.
• Here is a link for some Summer Opportunities that were discussed at the March 6th meeting
• Summer Opportunities presentation
• English
• Spanish
• We'd love to have your input! Here is a link to a parent survey
• Parent Survey – Deadline extended to May 15.
• Know someone who is doing an awesome job supporting the needs of gifted and advanced students? Nominate them today for the G/T Spotlight Award here: G/T Spotlight Award Nomination
  

Our first graders have been working SO hard all year long, and it has been a blast to watch them grow! Their passion projects turned out amazing, and I loved getting to see their creative visions come to life.

Mrs. Gonzales’ students enjoyed constructing dioramas to extend and deepen their study of animals. They conducted research on an animal of choice and created a diorama to represent the animal’s habitat that includes all the basic needs. Additionally, the diorama exhibits a complete food chain that would be found in that environment. Other students are progressing through the stages of the writing process to publish a fable of their own.

Mrs. Meredith’s students have been busy deepening their understanding of our current reading and math units through the use of choice boards. The students were very interested in answering our Module 10 Question: What can we learn from different people and cultures? Students took the opportunity to create posters, write stories and create games that were of interest to them.

We have been so excited to see our students grow in all academic areas this year! We enjoyed working with our third graders on their showcase presentations, including designing their own gardens and utopian cities. We invited guest speakers, Mayor Travis Mitchell and organic farmer Tim Miller, to answer questions about their research, and it was fun to see the creativity that was poured into these projects.

We will be concluding the year with some deductive reasoning activities, KiwiCo projects, choice board activities in math and reading, and Google slideshows on dangerous animals. Students will research a dangerous animal of their choice and present slideshows of information and visuals to go along with their facts. These kids are ready for 4th grade!

- Mrs. Prunty, Ms. Toledo, Mrs. Adams, and Ms. Aguilar

Our amazing fourth graders really showed off this year! We have spent the semester working on submitting poetry to the Young American Poetry Digest contest where 8 of our GT students were published into the the 2024 YAPD book. In January, we had 7 students submit projects to the Hays History Contest. 4 students (Olivia M, Katelyn J, Anna F, and Emma D) moved on to the second round of the district level, 2 students (Olivia M and Katelyn J) moved on to the regional level, and 1 student (Olivia M) competed at the state level! Our students have also worked diligently to complete their final showcase projects. We had all 18 of our GT 4th graders complete projects to include the newly qualified students. In class, some of our students have been working on book clubs and movie trailer projects, research extensions, STEAM projects, and more! It has been an honor working with these hardworking scholars this year! We are so proud of our Panthers!!

They all had so much fun working on their passion projects! It was amazing to see them get so excited to share their knowledge with everyone else. Our class learned about baseball, the history of art, anime, horses, pill bugs and we even got to play one student’s game that he coded!

"I loved seeing each student work so hard on their passion projects. Some students took a research presentation that we did in ELAR and expanded on it for their project. It was so cool to see!"-Ms. Callahan