The Lower School at LCA offers gifted students the Journey Program, which provides academic enrichment through a series of nurturing and stimulating activities in an informal, relaxed setting.
The program was developed to meet the needs of 2nd–5th grade students who demonstrate an extraordinarily high degree of intellectual, academic, creative, and/or artistic abilities. During the screening process, students are evaluated in these four categories and must score at or above the 95 percentile on the Kauffman Brief Intelligence Test (K-BIT) Second Edition, a nationally-used intelligence survey test.
Throughout the 2017–2018 school year, the Journey Program offered four sessions that encouraged the students to research and explore a topic of their interest in Genius Hour, to become an Egyptologist, to learn coding basics with Scratch, and to engage in two and three-dimensional tasks that promote spatial reasoning.
To culminate the Journey Program this year, students went to UGA and met with Ms. Georgia Hodges, assistant research scientist and MAT coordinator in the Department of Mathematics and Science Education. Ms. Hodges, along with members of her team, guided the students through the steps of writing a computer program. Students were given the choice of three topics to develop.
““I liked learning what it takes to build amazing computer games with a team.””
The students then collaborated in groups and created a storyboard of ideas for the topic they tackled of how to encourage Americans to exercise more in our sedentary lifestyle. Fifth-grade Journey student Addie Godfrey said, “I enjoyed working together as a team. You can get great ideas from others.” Ms. Hodges wrapped up their time by encouraging the students to continue to develop skills of collaboration and working well with others.
For lunch, the students went to The Mediterranean Grill in Athens, which correlated to their Egypt session. They were able to try authentic Middle Eastern food, such as Babba Ghanouj, Tabouleh, Dolma, Baklava, Falafels, and Hummus. Another Journey student, Scarlett Gary,said “I liked going to The Mediterranean Grill and trying different foods. I really liked the pistachio baklava!”
For more information on LCA’s Journey Program, click HERE.
