Centennial G/T Parent Newsletter

Happy New Year & welcome back! As the new year gets underway, I am SO excited for our last two units with Invention Project! This month, we will be investigating & exploring water pollution, wetlands, water filtration systems, and pipelines. Our kiddos will be delving into each topic through hands-on experiments and engaging forms of learning for all learning styles!

Thanks for all you do,

❤️-Mrs. Barrera

Thursday, February 10, 2022, from 8 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern time (Parent Focus)

Parenting Gifted Boys to Become Awesome Young Men
with Dr. Thomas Hébert - University of South Carolina

Boyhood is filled with wonderful possibilities and difficult challenges. Guys growing up gifted today must negotiate a culture that may not be supportive of their talents, interests, and favored ways of learning. This webinar explores parenting strategies to provide boys the tools they need to negotiate adolescent peer group pressures, remain actively engaged in school and achievement oriented, maintain supportive friendships, and develop the identity of a gifted male.

Thomas P. Hébert, Ph.D. is professor of gifted and talented education at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Hébert has more than a decade of K-12 classroom experience working with gifted students and 25 years in higher education training graduate students and educators in gifted education. He has also conducted research for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented (NRC/GT) and served on the Board of Directors of the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC). He received the 2012 Distinguished Alumni Award from the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut and the 2019 Distinguished Scholar Award from NAGC.

Thursday, March 10, 2022, from 8 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern time (Parent Focus)

Talent Denied and Talent Lost: Challenges and Compromises of Gifted Girls and Women
with Dr. Sally Reis - University of Connecticut

This session will focus on the loss of talents of girls and women across the country and the globe, and the implications of that phenomenon on diminished creativity, leadership, innovation, and creative productivity. The session will conclude with a positive call to action on how educators and researchers can make a difference in helping girls and women to develop their talents.

Sally M. Reis, Pd.D. recently completed a six-year term as the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and is the Letitia Neag Morgan Chair in Educational Psychology, a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, and a University Teaching Fellow at the University of Connecticut. She was a teacher for 15 years, 11 of which were spent working with gifted students on the elementary, junior high, and high school levels. She has authored or co-authored over 250 articles, books, book chapters, monographs, and technical reports. Her research interests are related to special populations of gifted and talented students, including students with learning disabilities, gifted females, and diverse groups of talented students. She is also interested in extensions of the Schoolwide Enrichment Model both for gifted and talented students and as a way to expand offerings and provide general enrichment to identify talents and potentials in students who have not been previously identified as gifted. She is the co-director of Confratute, the longest running summer institute in the development of gifts and talents.

Register Here: https://gifted.uconn.edu/register/

Listen to the new Advanced Learning Podcast where they discuss anything and everything related to advanced learning in Humble ISD in less time than it takes you to get from home to school or work.

The Advanced Learning Podcast is available on all podcasting platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts and new episodes are released every two weeks. Have an idea for a topic you want discussed? Reach out to advanced.learning@humbleisd.net and your idea may be featured as a podcast topic!

Bookworms will love the social interactions, book exchanges, and book reviews that occur on Bookopolis. Children set up their accounts on the social reading site and then proceed to create book lists, reviewing books, and interacting with other members. There are also curated built-in book lists, read-alike lists, and Common Core-aligned book lists for various age brackets.

Trivia, puzzles, and word games add more variety to the book-reading activities, too. Children can also make their avatars, earn points and badges, and record their reading progress.

Science covers such a diverse range of topics that gifted children will likely not run out of options. Science Friday, a radio program with weekly broadcasts on public radio stations, tackles everything about science. It may be microbes in the body this week and then outer space with its quasars, pulsars, and black holes next week.

The host and guests always ensure that these topics are tackled in an entertaining and informative way – no patronizing the kids! The broadcasts are also available on iTunes, in podcasting format, and on Sirius XM Radio.

Tuesday 2:00-3:00pm 2nd grade

Wednesday 8:45-9:45 3rd grade

Wednesday 2:00-3:00pm 1st grade

Friday 8:15-9:15am 2nd grade SIP

Friday 9:35-10:35am 5th grade

*days and times subject to change based on testing schedule or unexpected events*

Erica Barrera

Centennial Elementary

Email: ebarrer@humbleisd.net
Website: https://www.humbleisd.net/Domain/11889
Location: 15130 Timber Forest Drive Houston, Texas 77044
Phone: 281-641-8854
Twitter: @EricaMBarrera