Lost in Lexicon—Clever, Imaginative Reading for Gifted Students
Are you looking gifted for curriculum for a literature unit, a literature/math unit, or an enrichment group? Here is a great idea.
Pendred Noyce is a physician, educator, and writer. She is creative person who has used her talents to come out with a book for young people that combines a good story with word games and mathematical thinking. The book would be good (in my opinion) to use with middle to upper elementary gifted students.
Lost in Lexicon: Adventure in Words and Numbers was originally written for Noyce’s son Damian’s ninth birthday to challenge and entertain him.
But wait...
Lost in Lexicon is both a book and a
website. The website is filled with supportive teaching material, including
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Character sketches from the book
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Challenging games and activities
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Ideas to extend concepts in the book (i.e., Greek and Latin roots, the coordinate plane, poetic meter, mathematical slope)
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Word challenges
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Discussion questions
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Noyce’s keynote address to the Iowa Science and Mathematics Teacher Educators Summit, titled Grand Challenges and Inspiration: Lighting the Fire in the Next Generation. The address is not only inspiring, but it is also filled with some excellent resources for working with gifted kids in math and science.
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From the same Iowa Summit, Noyce includes the transcript from her breakout session, Can Math and Literature Mix in the Middle School? The ideas the author presents might be used with middle school students, but could also be used with gifted students in upper elementary school. Suggestions are presented not only for Lost in Lexicon, but also for Flatland by Edwin Abbott and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.
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Two teacher-created units using Lost in Lexicon: "Teaching Plot Structure and Types of Conflict," and "Teaching Characterization."
Pendred Noyce also has a blog titled
View from the Windowseat. While the blog covers many different subjects, with a bit of hunting, you will find even more ideas to use with
Lost in Lexicon.
Three more novels in the Lexicon series are planned, along with other books for young people.