Primary Enrichment Program

All students in kindergarten are considered to be part of the Primary Enrichment Program (PEP). PEP is a cooperative effort involving regular kindergarten classroom teachers and the gifted specialist. Instruction focuses on the development of critical and creative thinking processes. Strategy lessons, learning centers and enrichment units are presented within the classroom. The curriculum focuses on teaching different types of thinking.

During these lessons we look for children who possess outstanding imagination, high thinking ability, innovative, or creative reasoning ability, unusual ability to problem solve, and/or high attainment in original or creative thinking. We encourage creativity in all students by focusing on Fluency (many ideas), Flexibility (looking at things in a new way), Originality (one-of-a-kind ideas), and Elaboration (details)

Critical thinking requires the students to engage in more complex thinking. It is systematic and allows children to state their reasons with supporting details. During this unit students have the opportunity to analyze and sequence information. They are asked to locate discrepancies, look for patterns, and record and graph data based on these patterns.

Deductive reasoning requires a person to analyze, evaluate, reason, and draw conclusions. It is an important skill that must be learned and developed by students of all ages. During this 9-week unit students learn to break deductive reasoning down into specific thinking skills that are needed to reason and draw conclusions. Those skills are:

• sequencing	finding order
• attribute listing	uses a high degree of analysis to separate information by looking at its various characteristics
• find relationships	has ability to find relationships between ideas
• discover analogies	two pairs of ideas with the same relationship
• deductive reasoning	uses deduction to reach conclusions that are valid and reasonable byusing the process of elimination

Effective problem solving involves having a variety of strategies to use in order to unlock a solution to a problem. In this unit the students are taught how to use the following strategies to solve many different kinds of problems: sequential deductive reasoning, making an organized list, using or drawing a picture of the problem, comparing and contrasting attributes of elements in the problem, and relating cause and effect relationships to prevent another problem from occurring. The students are encouraged to use a combination of strategies that utilize critical and creative thinking in order to find a solution.


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