Reply to What is the point of AAP? I am getting to the conclusion the only real benefit is to have my child

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Reply to "What is the point of AAP? I am getting to the conclusion the only real benefit is to have my child"

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[quote=Anonymous]The biggest difference is driven by the need for the students to pass the SOLs at the end of the year.  For the gen ed classes, it's pretty much taught to passing the SOLs and to the group within the class that needs the most intervention to be able to do so.  If you know the content, quite often you are on the side doing busy work while the teacher helps the rest of the class at the same point.  And reinforcement over and over of the concepts so that as many as possible can answer the questions correctly on the SOLs.

For AAP, they go over a subject and then move on, without over and over reinforcement, because they can move more quickly.  Or they can go into more depth with fun side projects that are enriching.  My favorite was "The Dig", where the AAP 5th history classes split into groups and created their own civilization with language, religion, government, culture, appearance, location, etc.  Each student created an artifact about their portion of the civilization, then all the teams buried their artifacts in the morning on Dig day.  In the afternoon, another team digs up their artifacts on an archeology plot grid and examines the artifacts, seeing what they can glean about the other team's civilization from the artifacts.  It was so frickin cool.  That night parents were able to come in, talk to the teams and see the artifacts.  It was impressive.

Every year the teachers wanted to include gen ed kids in "The Dig" but couldn't because you had to speed through the SOL content to have time to do it.  Some of the gen ed population couldn't go that fast, and how do you choose which ones can without it being a big can of worms?  So it was limited to AAP kids.

That is an example of why you do AAP if you can.[/quote]

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