Questions? Click here to contact Diana Holmes, Westland's Gifted and Talented Coordinator

UPCOMING EVENTS

Expanding Horizons - Montgomery College Youth Programs announce "Expanding Horizons," a special one-day enrichment program for gifted and talented students in grades 6, 7 and 8.  The program will be held on Saturday, February 23, 2008 at MC's Rockville Campus. To register, call (240) 567-7917, or go to www.montgomerycollege.edu/youth.

The deadline for registration is Monday, February 18, 2008.

Maryland Summer Centers for Gifted and Talented Students -

• Live as a child from the 1700s

• Design a space mission

• Work with environmentalists, mathematicians, geologists, physicists, and paleontologists

• Explore the Chesapeake on a schooner

• And much more...

For more information and a video presentation, visit www.marylandpublicschools.org/summercenters or see Ms. Holmes here at Westland. Applications must be postmarked by April 15, 2008.

Gifted and Talented Classes - Gifted and Talented Classes: Montgomery College is offering enrichment courses for students in grades 3-12. Some courses include Keyboarding for Computers, Expressive Poetry, Strategies for Success, Cartooning, Aggressive Learning, and more. Courses are offered after school and on Saturdays throughout the year at the Rockville or TakomaPark/Silver Spring campus. There is a fee for each course. Brochures are available in the Westland guidance office. Registration is due at least five days before the start of the class. Scholarships are offered for those students on free and reduced lunches.  Sessions run in the Fall and Spring. For more information call 240-567-7917 or 240-567-7264.

The New SAT

What’s It All About?

The new SAT applies to students, beginning with the graduating class of 2006. The content of this test will change starting with the administration scheduled for March of 2005. The October 2004 PSAT/NMSQT exam also will reflect this shift. Major changes are as follows:  

CONTENT

• Writing

Students will be asked to write an essay that requires them to take a position on an issue and use examples to support their position. Questions similar to the multiple-choice questions on the SAT II: Writing Subject Test will be included to see how well students use standard written English .

The new math section will include topics from third-year college preparatory math (Algebra II type content), such as exponential growth, absolute value, and functional notation, and will place greater emphasis on other topics such as linear functions, manipulations with exponents, and properties of tangent lines.

The critical reading section, currently known as the verbal section, will include shorter reading passages along with the existing long reading passages. Analogies will be eliminated, but sentence-completion questions will remain.

SCORING  

A perfect set of new SAT scores will now=2400, as opposed to 1600. The breakdown is as follows:

Writing W 200-800

Math M 200-800

Critical Reading CR 200-800

TEST DURATION  

Testing time for the new SAT is approximately a half hour longer

or 3 hours and 35 minutes.

Writing =50 min. Math=70 min. Critical Reading =70 minutes

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Westland ’s Response to the Rigors of the New SAT  

Preparation for the Writing portion of the SAT

• Daily Warm-up Activities: Eighth grade English teachers will use daily warm-up activities to review and reinforce various aspects of written language. Exercises will promote student understanding of paragraphs, sentence structure, conjugation, subject-verb agreement, parallelism, punctuation, precise pronoun use, and so on.

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Preparation for the Critical Reading portion of the SAT

• Reading strategies instruction: Teachers will continue to model and instruct students to use recommended strategies to enhance reading comprehension at both the literal and inferential level. To this end, they will use strategies including: clarifying questions, previewing, setting a purpose, predicting, looking for essential information, summarizing, etc.

For additional information on the new SAT and PSAT, visit:

www.collegeboard.com

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Resources and Information on the Gifted Student

Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations Gifted Child Committee: This committee site offers a wealth of valuable resources, including links, reports from past meetings, and information about upcoming meetings.

MCPS Office of Accelerated and Enriched Instruction: A rich source of school-based information about identifying giftedness, characteristics of highly able students by content area, and MCPS programming and contacts.

National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented: This site offers a range of research-based resources on such topics as identification, bilingual education, curriculum, and undeserved populations.

Education Week also has an online archive of articles about gifted education, with information on how educators can identify and serve gifted children and such alternative education programs as blending high school and college.

Council for Exceptional Children Some students may have both giftedness and a learning disability, which can be even more challenging for teachers. This site provides information on gifted students, students with disabilities, and other exceptional students.

GT/LD Links

The GT/LD Network

TAG Family Network—“run by and for parents, this organization is dedicated to education and advocacy for gifted and talented youth. …It contains current information on gifted education, with links to other sites of interest to parents, educators, and children.”

The Gifted Child Society— a non-profit organization which “provides educational enrichment and support services for gifted children, assistance to parents, and training for educators.”

The Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (CTY)