Despite the great upheaval caused by COVID-19, there have also been new developments regarding the Juan y Rosa learning method. I have made two activities from the Juan y Rosa series available in a Dutch learning environment called Acadin (website: Acadin.nl), which provides a challenging educational offering for gifted pupils. For the English-speaking market I have put two activities on the Juan y Rosa website so that everybody can try out the Juan y Rosa Spanish learning method for themselves. There is one activity for pupils aged 5 to 8 years old and one for pupils aged 8 to 13 years old. Click on them to try them out!
How can you learn Spanish without being in an environment where it is the native language? For every primary school pupil, but especially for the gifted, that is a big challenge because they have to work on increasing their tension arc. The activities on the website are aimed at letting pupils discover how much fun it is to start with something so difficult that it builds that tension arc – and not for weeks or months, but potentially for years. Besides learning Spanish to level A2+ CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) with Juan y Rosa, they will gain many new educational insights.
Fortunately, the Spanish language is not completely absent from a child’s natural environment. For example, there are plenty of Spanish recipes to be found, Spanish can be heard in some pop music, there are numerous children’s films and songs available in Spanish online, and Spanish is widely spoken in the football world. This all means that pupils can also practice the new language well at home if they want to!
The Juan y Rosa learning method actively encourages them to do this, which helps schools to accommodate the needs of gifted children within regular classes.
LBBO-SB (Specialist Begaafdheid, specialist on the gifted)
LBBO is a national professional group for educational supervisors in the Netherlands. This includes internal counsellors, ambulatory counsellors, young-child specialists, behavioural specialists, image counsellors and specialists on the gifted. In November 2019, I joined the departmental committee of the latter group: an enthusiastic group of experts who are all in some way specialists on the gifted. They contribute to an active network for primary school supervisors of pupils who can, want or need to be more challenged. Search for the LBBO-SB group via the LBBO website and/or on Facebook, add the pages to your favourites and visit them regularly to find relevant information about the gifted.
OPEN SPACE EDUCATION CONCEPT by Willem Wind
In recent weeks I regularly came across messages from Willem Wind, how I first discovered as the author of the book called Hoe het leven mij misleidde (How life misled me) in 2000. Reading that book marked the start of my quest into the implications of being gifted and the possible consequences you can experience in everyday life.
His website (ikbenhoogbegaafd.nl/mijn-favoriete-messaging/) provides a lot of information about his fresh look at giftedness.
The articles titled “Top-Down Education”, “The Splits of the Gifted” and “Open Space Education in a Nutshell” have particularly caught my attention and I would therefore like to share them with you (also available in English). The idea for the Juan y Rosa learning method has been developed based on the idea that each pupil is responsible for making their own learning process interesting and useful – and Juan y Rosa is happy to help them do so!
