Engaging Gifted Readers & Writers: 35 Ideas for Integrating Common Core Into Your Language Arts Curriculum

35 Ideas for Integrating Common Core Into Your Language Arts Curriculum

Our students live in a fast-paced, high-tech world. If they aren't motivated to learn, if they aren't engaged, we lose them. Perhaps the worst part of this is that once they become disengaged, they will never achieve what they are capable of.

Engaging Gifted Readers & Writers... contains a balance of lessons balanced in many ways. First, it contains an assortment of reading, writing and speaking lessons. These are further divided among expository, persuasive, informational, and poetry lesson. Some will take less than a class period; others can take a week. The longer lessons are designed to be flexible enough for you to adjust expectations to meet your time constraints. Regardless of time constraints you face, all lessons are written to be easy to implement. Finally we offer both collaborative and individual activities.

We want the lessons to engage students. This means students find them challenging, but not frustrating. They are open ended, allowing students to being their own voice to them, to express their own creative ideas. The lessons guide students to develop the skills needed to take their original ideas, develop them in depth, and articulate them in alignment with the Common Core Standards.

Kenneth J. Smith, Ph.D., works at Sunset Ridge School District 29 in Northfield, IL, a suburb of Chicago. He currently runs the district-wide enrichment program. He has also taught language arts at the Latin School of Chicago and educational statistics at National-Louis University. In 1995, Ken earned his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Columbia University in New York. His work has appeared in journals such as The Middle School Journal and Gifted Child Today. Ken is a frequent speaker at conferences for state and national organizations, including the International Reading Association, the Illinois Association for Gifted Children, MacWorld, the National Association for Gifted Children, and the National Council of Teachers of English.