[Adapted from: Feldhusen, JF, Proctor, TB & Black, KN (1986): Guidelines for Grade Advancement of Precocious Children. Roeper Review, 9(1), 25-27.]

Acceleration involves speeding the student's passage through school by:

curriculum acceleration within a year level

curriculum compression or compaction

subject acceleration

grade or year skipping

Some considerations:

Assessment
Not all gifted students need formal testing to decide on accelerating them. Academic and social-emotional levels should be considered.

Academic Level
The child should have skill levels above the average of the intended class.

Student's Ability to Adjust.
The child should be free of adjustment problems. In some cases, social or emotional problems are caused by inappropriate level placement.

Physical Health & Size
The student should be reasonably healthy. Physical size for competitive sports may be important in later years.

Student's Eagerness to Advance
A child should not feel pressured by parents to accelerate. The student should want to accelerate.

Receiving Teacher
The new teacher must be positive about acceleration and willing to help the child adjust to the new environment.

Social & Emotional Maturity
Judgments should include input from parents, guidance personnel and/or a psychologist. Gifted students may be rejected by new, older classmates. Lack of close peer relationships does not mean social immaturity.

Timing of Advancement
Advancement should occur at natural transition points such as the beginning of the school year. Mid-year advancement can allow the prior teacher to more easily help in a smooth transition.

Trial Period
Acceleration should be on a trial basis of at least a few weeks. If the trial period is not a success, the option of returning to the original placement will be there. This is not a "failure".

Cautions
Excessive expectations because of acceleration. Further acceleration may have to be considered for exceptionally gifted students. Uneven development may require more flexible programming and different provision to meet needs.

Deciding Whether to Advance
Base acceleration on facts not myths. Acceleration can provide academic and social benefits. Leaving the child in the original situation may lead to poor study habits, apathy, lack of motivation and maladjustment.

Overall, the advantages and disadvantages of grade advancement must be assessed for each individual case. Research shows there are more positives when gifted children are accelerated.

A Wrinkle in Telling Time
(by O.S.)

The other day I wore my watch that had hands on the face. I usually wear a digital one with just numbers showing. Some thoughts came to mind about how our concept of time changes just by using one type of watch over another.

You may be surprised to know that many young people don’t know how to read an analog watch anymore. Ask them. I was actually shocked. They have used a digital readout for so long that old style watches seem foreign to them. Many can’t tell what time it is when they see the hands!

When viewing an analog watch, there is an awareness of time movement at three speeds – seconds, minutes, hours. With digital watches, one sees only seconds ticking by as numbers. Analog watches provide a visual picture of the change of time because the hands move to different locations and the spaces between the hands change. A sense of time passage at different speeds is acquired.

Digital watches show time at only the moment. The changing of numbers do not create an abstract image. The sense of time passage is altered.

So what? Here are some possible effects of learning to tell time and relating to it only as numbers:

• we see in analog mode. We do not take in tiny bits and make them into a picture. We see the whole thing at once. Perhaps we will change the way we perceive time.
• young children will not be developing an internal spatial concept of the passage of time from a three dimensional model.
• perhaps the degree to which people are impatience will get even worse as their concept of time changes to even more in the immediate. Digital time is compressible!
• Instant gratification and relentless multi-tasking may be related to this. Let’s cram everything into only this moment that I’m aware of.
• Many people live frantic, hurried lives as if they are aware of only the seconds ticking by.
• People will lose the ability to judge how long some jobs will take. There will be no past experience from an internal visual point of view. Jobs will be done more and more on a contract basis rather than by the hour because the ability to estimate time is weakening.

Just some thoughts.

June 4 – International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression

June 5 – World Environment Day

June 11 – Full Moon

June 17 – World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought

June 18 - Father’s Day

June 20 – World Refugee Day

June 21 – National Aboriginal Day/First Nations Day

June 21 – first day of summer. Summer solstice.

Longest day in the year – northern hemisphere.

June 24 – St. Jean de Baptiste Day (Quebec)

June 26 – International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking

June 26 – U.N. International Day in Support of Victims of Torture

This is also the month for special recognition of: Brain Injury, Adopt-a-Cat, Dairy, Great Outdoors, Fireworks Safety, Bike, Seniors.

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Saving Hard Drive space: With programs, music and video files getting bigger and bigger, you might be running out of space on what you thought was a large capacity hard drive. Instead of saving work in MS Word format, convert documents to .txt format.

Go to "File" and then "Save As." Give the document a title and open the "Save as type: " window. Highlight *.txt and save it. The document is now in its barest form with no fancy titles, etc. Instead of about 30K of memory, the document will now be saved in about 6K.

Convert strictly informational .doc’s to this format and save many bytes of memory.

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• the launching mechanism of a carrier ship that helps planes to take off could throw a pickup truck over a mile.
• there are two animated characters that have stars on the sidewalk of the Hollywood Walk of Fame: Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny
• Bugs Bunny is the world’s most popular rabbit.
• The odds of living to age 116 are 1 in 2 billion.
• An Oscar statuette costs about $300 to make.
• In Venice, Venetian Blinds are called Persian Blinds.
• Women are more likely than men to eat food that has fallen on the floor.
• The shortest war in history took place in 1896 between Britain and Zanzibar. It lasted 38 minutes. Britain won.
• When a dog is making a long, loud panting sound, it’s laughing.
• The risk of children becoming overweight almost doubles if the mother smokes during pregnancy.
• Your right ear is better at hearing speech. Your left ear is better at picking up music.
• The names of all the continents end with the letter they start with.

`"Dance therapy (also called dance/movement therapy) is the use of choreographed or improvised movement as a way of treating social, emotional, cognitive, and physical problems. Throughout the ages, people of many cultures have used dance to express powerful emotions, tell stories, treat illness, celebrate important events, and maintain communal bonds. Dance therapy harnesses this power of movement in a therapeutic setting and uses it to promote personal growth, health, and well-being….

….dance therapist will watch you dance, encourage you to express your feelings through movement, and, at times, imitate your movements (this is called "empathic mirroring") to establish rapport and make you feel accepted. The therapist may also try to help you connect your thoughts, feelings, and memories to your movements.

If you are part of a dance therapy group, the dance therapist will typically assess how the group works together--how you all interact and share emotional expression through movement--and intervene or direct the action accordingly."

You will have to be an independent businessperson who likes to set his/her own agenda and specialized in at least one particular art form. See the web sites of the people below for more ideas:

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The Secret River by Kate Grenville. 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize winner. Story is about a convict sent to prison in Australia.

Alligator by Lisa Moore. This was one of the competitors in this contest.

Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan.

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21^st Century by Thomas L. Friedman

With the controversial Da Vinci Code now out comes a closer look at how religions are portrayed in movies. Does Hollywood get it right when it makes religious movies? Yes, and no.

When writers do their homework, there is often authenticity. However, studios don’t make it a habit to hire religious people specifically for a project so on the other hand, there can be critical failings.

Up until the 1960’s Hollywood was adamant about not offending. Although there may have been over-stylized and ideal view of people in religions, it was more acceptable than the often disparaging views presented today.

Hollywood knows that lots of money can be made by stirring religious fervour in many ways. Debate is good for box office take.