Standard 3: DIFFERENTIATED CURRICULUM and INSTRUCTION

• "The LEA employs challenging, rigorous, and relevant curriculum and instruction K-12 to accommodate a range of academic, intellectual, social and emotional needs of gifted learners."

Standard 3 CHANGES IN THE  2019-2022 NHCS AIG Plan:

Standard A

Two minor changes address K-3 Nurturing and advanced students in mathematics

At Carolina Beach Elementary, classroom teachers work closely with the Gifted Education Specialist to ensure that content, process, product, that is, learning environment, is meaningfully differentiated and appropriately challenging. Service delivery is multi-faceted and flexible in order to best meet each student’s individual needs,.

The AIG program at Carolina Beach School follows the Elementary School AIG Service Framework for New Hanover County Schools.

Differentiation within the Curriculum: Students served in the AIG Program are working above grade level and require specialized instruction to be appropriately challenged. Teachers at Carolina Beach Elementary School employ a variety of strategies and practices to meet the needs of our gifted learners.

CBES's teachers use a variety of best practices to meet the needs of all learners in their classrooms. The following list is a sampling of tools used for differentiation in the classroom. Teachers tailor each of these to meet the needs of all students, including gifted learners.

Choice boards RAFT assignments Tiered assignments Think Tac Toe boards

Cluster grouping Think Dots Learning Contracts Rubric Scoring

Questioning Anchor Activities Independent Study

Nurturing Program: Lessons involving creativity, logic, problem solving, deductive thinking, evaluative thinking, spatial reasoning and more are taught by CBES's Gifted Education Specialist and classroom teachers. These lessons help students relate their grade level curriculum to higher level thought processes. Please visit the "PETS: Thinking Skills" link on the left for more information.

Kindergarten: By mid-year, units expose and challenge students in the areas of Creativity, Logic, and Problem Solving. We begin evaluative thinking at this level.

First Grade: Lessons center around Thinking Skills and the Primary Education Thinking Skills (PETS) program, including deductive, logical, evaluative, spatial, and convergent thinking. Units are designed to challenge all learning levels and help make stronger connections to grade level skills and thought processes. Evaluative thinking continues at this level.

Second Grade: Units are designed to combine the concepts from Kindergarten and First Grade Nurturing Lessons as students merge thinking skills, use logical reasoning while working to reason at a higher level, and consider mathematical concepts through visual/spatial manipulation at a higher level. Evaluative thinking is a large focus of this grade level's nurturing program.

Think Lab: The Think Lab is a special place where students practice their thinking skills in a nontraditional way. For example, students use their deductive, logical, evaluative, spatial, and convergent thinking skills with specific games such as Apples to Apples and the popular Rush Hour, for example. More information is located under the PETS: Thinking Skills section.

Want ways to help your child at home? Take an inventory of the games you have available. This can be board games, backyard games, card games... anything. Talk with the CBES's Gifted Education Specialist about your list. Together we can target specific thinking skills required for each game. By doing this, you can be more intentional with your conversation when your child is playing a game at home.