Sprite's Site

“That was the best Introducing Yourself exercise ever!” Sprite told me.
“We had to make a picture describing ourselves with dots for International Dot Day http://www.facebook.com/pages/International-Dot-Day/141533819216932?v=info#info_edit_sections

It is all based on a book The Dot about a girl called Vashti who didn’t think she was creative until she drew one dot. The message is just make a mark and see where it takes you.
You can read about it here http://www.fablevision.com/education/products/dot_book.html
You can see some of the work done last year at http://fablevisionlearning.com/blog/?cat=57

“So, tell me about your dot picture” I said.

“Well, I asked Imaginational Dabrowski to help me think of all the things I do which are dot shaped. So I put in the Shape Collages of pictures of me and pictures of my holiday. I put in the life balance wheel and that made me think about time and infinity. Infinity reminded of space and Mandelbrot sets and Mobius strips and that reminded me of Mobius bagels.”

“I can see that you have also put in a tessellation dot, a water drop dot and balloons and one of your protest march banners” I said “But why is there a kangaroo in the picture?”

“That is the kangaroo from the Australian children’s book Dot and the Kangaroo. She came looking for Dot”

The journey through cyberspace to attend the #gtstoogies Global Bake off – Delicious Dessert Delicacies proved typical of life with Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities.

Sensual complained throughout the trip. The seat was too bumpy. The wind was blowing in his face and whistling in his ears. He felt queasy. He was anxious about the food at the Bake off and wondered whether it would contain anything that he would be allergic to which would make him itchy.

Imaginational was also speculating about the Bake off and what each of the #gtstoogies would cook for the event. He imagined what the twinkling lights could be – perhaps they were stars and the cyberbike was flying though space. Perhaps they were lights in homes, or a glow worm grotto or maybe they were patches of phosphorescence and the cyberbike was flying over an ocean. Maybe they were party lights and the cyberbike was heading toward the most wonderful glittering gala occasion!

Intellectual kept up a running commentary about the geography and history of the surroundings and tried to engage everyone with word games, memory games and I spy type games. He did become a bit tedious and pedantic at times.

Emotional reacted with yelps of delight or howls of despair to every sight, sound and scent.

And Psycho Motor sometimes sat on the cyberbike and sometimes ran beside it trying to bite the wheels. He barked constantly; excited about the Bake off, excited about the spinning wheels, excited about the twinkling lights and wanting to run off and inspect each new tree and signpost. He kept up a running commentary of “Are we nearly there? Are we there yet? Oh, look! Look at that! Are we there yet?

The Twitter birds have called in the Ow.ly birds to help give directions and act as shorteners for our cyberbike journey!

The Invitation to the Global Bake off – Delicious Dessert Delicacies from around the world to be held in the #gtstoogies lobby and annex before and after the #gtchat sessions this week read

“Ride your Cyberbike up past your email account.. turn right at facebook junction… drive up the global network highway until you reach the summit.. nestled down below in the darkness you will see some softly twinkling lights.. spiral down via information whirl to the end following the tendrils of banana and chocolate…”

We do not need to fly in international taste tester canines for the Global Bake off but as I set off on my Cyberbike to deliver the Pavlova, Lamingtons and Chocolate Ripple Cake from Australia I realised that Emotional, Imaginational and Sensual Dabrowski were already in the sidecar, Intellectual was ready to hop up on the seat and PsychoMotor was running and bouncing along beside the bike following the delicious smells of chocolate which were wafting through the air !

“Stationery steps? Do you mean like walking on the spot?” asked Sprite when I suggested that our next step in the process of getting organized would be stationery steps.

“No I mean stationery with an e as in envelope not stationary with an a as in standing still’ I said “You can find out about common mistakes people make in English usage at Common errors in English Usage”
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/

One reason Sprite had problems getting organized in the study area of her life was that she never had the materials she needed for study in the place she needed them – they were at school when she needed them for homework and left at home when she should be handing them in at school.
Imaginational Dabrowski was getting tired of her claiming that the dog had eaten her homework and was sure she should be able to find more original explanations.

The school was making some token moves towards being the Paperless Classroom advocated by Shelly Blake-Plock http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com/ but they still relied on some textbooks and ring binder notebooks.
We implemented advice from Allie Golon http://www.visualspatial.org/Articles/orgskill.pdf about using binders and colour coding for different subjects.

Gathering and storing information ‘in the cloud’ has helped as information can be accessed from anywhere online.
As well as the colour coded ring binders we set Sprite up with online LiveBinders from http://livebinders.com/
Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/ and Google Docs are useful for storing and accessing documents. Bookmarking sites such as Delicious http://www.delicious.com/ and Diigo http://www.diigo.com/ are also useful.

The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way. Psalm 37:23

Commit your way to the LORD,Trust also in Him, And He shall bring it to pass. Psalm 37:5

Many of the recipes for this weeks #gtstoogies feast can be found Dr Oetker’s German Home Cooking book or Oma Freitag’s recipe collection.
Wistful Black Dog is remembering the taste s and hoping there will be some left for him after the gtstoogies and the 15 taste tester dogs have finished eating

Getting distracted is one of the things preventing Sprite (and me!) from getting organized!

Sprite was supposed to be using the using the new hourglass type egg timer to give herself four minutes to complete a particular homework task but I found her with her alarm clock, a stop watch and the egg timer turning it over and over . She was sitting with first one expression on her face, then another, changing her facial expression each time she turned the egg timer.

“What ARE you doing?” I asked.

“I don’t think I can use the egg timer to do homework because I don’t think it is accurate!” she said. “I’m trying to check whether four minutes on the egg timer is the same as four minutes on the clock and the stopwatch is. And then I have to keep on trying it because I don’t think the sand runs through at the same rate each time. Do you know why I think that?”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well because I wonder whether the grains of sand go through the middle in the same order each time and whether they approach the middle on the same angle and whether they would go faster if they approached on a different angle and if the size of the grains makes any difference in how fast they go (because what if a big one goes first and gets stuck and the others have to jump over it?)

“What experiment could you do to find out?” I asked

“Well I think you would have to film the sand grains under a powerful microscope and analyze the film frame by frame and measure it in microns and millisecs and I don’t think I can really do it with an alarm clock and a stopwatch!”

So I posed Sprite’s question to my friends on Twitter and very speedily received a reply from @ljconrad See http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25194/

“And why were you putting on a different facial expression each time you turned the egg timer over?”

“Because I don’t think all seconds are the same lengths of time anyway! Time seems to go faster when you are happy and excited and slower when you are unhappy or bored. So I was trying to find out if that made a difference. But then it might not have worked; because even when I was pretending to be bored I really was interested to see whether it made a difference; so I wasn’t really bored and the grains of sand might know!”

Getting Sprite organized (and myself, for that matter) seemed such a huge task that I was not sure what to tackle next!

Lesley Sword’s article Gifted and Vague describes us perfectly! http://giftedservices.com.au/handouts/Gifted%20And%20Vague.doc

It was a great relief to go back to the transcripts of #gtchat at http://www.ingeniosus.net/gtchat-transcripts and find practical advice from parents who had ‘been there- done that’ as well as links to helpful articles from experts around the world
I found great articles on the Davidson Institute for Talent Development website such as Tips for Parents: Executive Functioning at Home and School by Amy Yermish at http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10523.aspx

Another helpful article was
Help your child get organized
http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_Helping_Your_Child/

Step 2 in getting Sprite organized was to help her have a more realistic sense of time. She never seemed to be quite sure what day of the week it was or how much time to allow for various activities.
Because she was not sure of which day it was she often forgot to take things to school. She needed to remember to take her guitar on Tuesdays and her P.E. uniform on Thursdays.
So we invested in A Window of Time eco-friendly transparent perpetual monthly calendar for her window http://www.awindowoftime.net/

I also put a whiteboard and cork pin board up for her and as well as her regular alarm clock I gave her an hourglass she could set to keep track of time spent on certain activities.

We discussed finding a balance in the amount of time spent on the various aspects of life and put a laminated Life Balance Wheel on her pin board which she could colour with wipe-off marker pens. There were many to choose from and I found a good example at http://www.avisionofyourown.com/lifewheel.pdf