Thank to you everyone who attended the Special Needs sessions at ISW this year. We hope you got some good information that you can take back to your own school to use. We were especially pleased with all the questions and insight shared at the Special Needs Roundtable. There are people out there doing great things with students!!!

As we start to look ahead to next year's ISW, we would like to encourage you to send us your ideas for sessions. The roundtable is definitely in again for next year, but what else would you like to see addressed? Do you know someone who is doing great things and should be a presenter? Would you be willing to come and share your experiences for a session? We would love to hear from you!!!!

One part of special needs is the gifted and talented students who sit in our classrooms. What can we do to challenge those students in our classrooms? I have a student that researches every solo she sings or plays on YouTube. She will listen to every version of the piece that she can find. She will compile a list of the aspects of each performance that she likes and dislikes and uses that list to help her make decisions regarding her performance of the piece. Often we will sit and talk about why she likes certain aspects of a performance or reasons why she did not like it. What a great way to teach about performance practices and musical choices. I have another student who thinks about music in a totally different way. He hears music in terms of colors and feelings. This has provided for many interesting conversations in my classroom. It has made a lot of students think differently about what they are hearing and how they are hearing it. This leads into opportunities to share information about the composer and why the music was written. It also provides great platform to talk about how the brain processes music and why the same piece of music can mean different things to different people.

Some of my students, who I would consider musically gifted and talented, really took to heart and totally amazed me with a simple Facebook project. I had my Music Appreciation class create Facebook pages for composers and then they had to post and comment on other composer's pages. Some of them really tried to take on their composer's personality and did extra research to better understand their person. We had public arguments going on between Brahms and Wagner and, at one point, Beethoven posted on Mozart's wall, "I can only assume you are fairly talented sir, as no one ever claimed listening to my music made their baby smarter." It turned out to be a really great project and it gave those students a chance to gain a deeper understanding about the composer's lives and where their music came from. One student had chosen Tchaikovsky's setting of the 23rd Psalm as a contest piece and after "walking a while in his shoes" gained a great deal of respect for his music. She was struggling with the piece at first, but after learning more about his life and music, the light bulb came on and the piece made sense.

What can you do in your classroom to challenge those higher level thinkers? It can be something as simple as a Facebook page, or asking what colors they hear in the music, or watching a YouTube video and asking them to think about what they like or don't like. Not only will this challenge your musically gifted students but it will make the rest of them think as well.