Gifted and Talented Students Showcased at Middle School

Students enrolled in the Gifted and Talented program at DEO Middle School have been busy this year creating projects including cultural masks, original pop-up books, working roller coasters and more.

Diana Daley is the gifted and talented/enrichment teacher at the middle school and arranged a showcase of work created this year by students in the sixth through eight grades.

Principal Whitney Perro said the showcase was "absolutely amazing."

"Students in the eighth grade worked in teams and created their own original restaurants in conjunction with the Foundation for Free Enterprise who came in and judged their work on 26 different components," Daley said.

Students had to create a blueprint, financial plan including business loans, job descriptions, interior and exterior designs, menus, advertisements and more.

"They had to create what questions they would ask potential employees on an interview, create the uniforms the staff would wear, set up an employee schedule and more," Daley said.

The winning restaurant in the challenge was "The Land of Emanon" which took first place.

The 19 eighth graders enrolled in the class were also busy creating their own unique pop-up books, many of them choosing to write their own original story for this individual project. Daley attended training at the Artist Teacher Institute which is where the idea for the pop-up book project came from four years ago. 

"It really challenges the students how to figure out how to make the pop-up techniques work and it is a great opportunity for them," Daley said. "Whether they are artistic or not, they are all proud of their books."

The 22 seventh graders worked hard in groups this year to research and then create their own working roller coasters, where marbles travel the length of the track, labeled with at least nine different physics terms.

"Students in the seventh grade also researched a real culture that has a mask as part of its tradition and created a power point presentation on what they learned," said Daley. "Each student then created the actual mask as the final part of the presentation."

The sixth grade class, which has 18 students, created their own "New Milford Monopoly" games by working in groups. Daley said students created the game boards, cards and game pieces.

"They were responsible for creating their boards and coming up with the photographs to be used around the boards," said Daley. Sixth graders also did an extensive unit on "bubble-ology" where they experimented with the properties of bubbles earlier in the year.