Channeling Students Into a Gifted Program

Checkpoint: Channeling Students into a Gifted Program

When you incorporate children into a gifted and talented program, should start early on when the children are young. Gifted children should have access to materials that can make their minds grow at an accelerated pace. This pace should be reflected in a specialized syllabus designed especially for the gifted child. Their activities should be more sophisticated and they should be exposed to a variety of schools of thought. This will help keep their hungry minds fed and that will prevent their attention from wandering elsewhere.

The accomplishments of the gifted students need to be recorded in some way. Some of these accomplishments will be rare indeed. I know one child in particular who is only one and a half. While at daycare this child successfully engages in certain activities with the three year old children. Such documentation of these rare events is known as an anecdotal.

We asked the director of this daycare center to place this one and a half year old child in a classroom with older children. In this situation the child would have a larger and more difficulty activity list. At the same time the child would be with children who were more advanced. This would then keep the gifted child moving forward in achieving their goals. If this is the case, boredom is not possible.

The director obliged. The gifted child was given more advanced activities to work with. Already at one year old, the child had complete knowledge of size and color. The child’s verbal skills were outstanding. If you think about how many one year olds talk in complete sentences to the other children and teachers? One of the advanced activities is real world experience. Normal one year olds could not fathom this kind of activity. One problem that must not be overlooked is the fact that the gifted child may be completely normal in many other ways. For example, the child may talk at a five year old...