Geología y altas capacidades intelectualesdespertando el pensamiento científico en el aula

Abstract

Gifted students constitute a group to which the educational system must pay special attention. Throughout their educational stage, many of these students experiment fear to rejection, frustration, school failure and lack of acceptance of their own identity, even concealing their abilities. Working with this sector of students requires an additional effort from the teaching staff. In this sense, geology can be used as a valuable didactic resource that provides pupils with the opportunity to develop skills through scientific thinking, promoting knowledge concerning the History of Earth by considering prior knowledge, students’ interests (constructivism) and direct observation. This is intended to promote teamwork, and both social and communication skills. In this manuscript, a didactic project is proposed for gifted students, developing six in-class sessions about geology: Madame mineral, Drink me, The color of maps, Fossils and extinctions, Connected and The magnetism of Earth. The distribution of these extracurricular after-school sessions is thought to be an hour and a half per session. They develop, in a broad sense, issues concerning general geology, the History of the Earth, identification of minerals and fossils, the water cycle in relation to its path through geological materials, geological maps, palaeogeography and Earth’s magnetic field throughout numerous didactic activities, which are being accepted by this collective with a high level of satisfaction.