A recent Saturday was a little more super for a group of students in the district’s Primary Talent Pool (PTP) thanks to an event organized by Gifted and Talented teacher Jenna Smith. Smith hosted a Super Saturday Fall Discovery event for PTP 1st - 3rd graders at Marion County High School where students rotated through stations designed to provide fun enrichment activities all with a fall theme.
Smith came up with five different stations for students that involved math, science, reading, and art activities.
At one, students found the circumference of a pumpkin and also made predictions on how many seeds were inside before they cut it open and counted. At another, they experimented with various fall objects (leaves, acorns, Halloween buckets) to see which would sink or float. Students also cut out leaves on coffee filters and colored them using markers to make a learning connection to chlorophyll.
“I thought it all went really well,” Smith said. “The kids were really excited to be there and they really liked the hands-on parts of the day.”
Students also read the story of Johnny Appleseed during the day’s events, which was selected in part because students are exposed to tall tales in a unit of study at the elementary level.
“They liked the reading activity,” Smith said. “Some of them even said, ‘This is like what we’ve read in class!’”
Students also got to compete in a pumpkin relay game where they navigated a pumpkin through an obstacle course without the use of their hand, which Smith said was the favorite activity among many of the students.
Smith also got a helping hand from a group of high school students enrolled in the Introduction to Education course at MCHS, who led the stations. Those older students then led a tour around MCHS.
“The kids loved being in the high school, and especially the library,” Smith said. “They were so excited to see the different parts of the school building and what goes on in each hallway.They had great questions too, like ‘How do I get to my class on time?’”
Saturday enrichment events are common among Gifted and Talented programs, but more recently have been absent in MCPS. Smith said she’ll likely plan a similar event for the spring, but she’s still deciding which grade levels will be involved.