What should a gifted classroom look like

It is important to remember that gifted students are gifted at all times of the day and should be appropriately challenged no matter where their education is happening.

To meet the needs of gifted students, school districts will often differentiate instruction. There are many differentiation strategies that districts will often use to meet the needs of gifted students. Tests Commonly Used What are my legal rights? Join Page. Process — how the student will acquire the content information. Product — how the student will demonstrate understanding of the content.

Below are some popular strategies: Anchor Activities: Provides students with meaningful activities that can be completed independently. May be leveled to students individual needs. Activity Menus Also known as choice menus. Integrate student choice, multiple learning strategies. How many of you hated a certain book in high school only to read it as an adult and see how wrong you were? The moment we lost choice of what to read in this case , we also lost joy.

Allowing gifted students to have choice in the classroom allows them to feel empowered and engaged. Choices do not need to be huge either, small choices are just as important. No one wants to only be the big fish in a small pond.

We want to be around people who will make us better and want to achieve more. Allow your gifted student to be challenged by participating in academic competitions such as National History Day. Your students will see what true competition is. This is one of the best ways to develop critical thinking.

Show a picture of clouds … what do you see? This type of activity develops fluency, elabora tion, originality and abstract thinking, which are all integral parts of being a creative thinker. There are so many wonderful resources embedded within—contests, lyric labs, lyric notes, connections to primary sources, teacher plans, corresponding handouts, questioning and so much more!

This will quickly become your favorite teaching resource. I promise! Why do we expect every book gifted students read to be 1. I say, if a student is enjoying a book, read it! Reading a book for a different purpose can increase the difficulty of a book without changing the text. Global Read Aloud is a program where one book is used to connect the world. Pernille Ripp founded GRA in with the simple idea to read a book aloud to her stude nts and during that time try to make as many global connections as possible.

This mission has grown exponentially and has reached over two million students. Collaborating with students in other states and countries will help a gifted student think empathetically. If you know a gifted s tudent, then you know that mythology can be a huge interest—often spurred by the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan.

Allow students to build a better understanding by incorporating mythology into different curricular units. This is an authentic way for gifted students to share their reading in a way that we would as adults. Creating readers means treating them like readers—when I finish a book I do not take a comprehension quiz.

I talk about it, share it with friends or write about it. Have your students react to reading like real readers. Kidblog is a great tool for creating safe student blogs. Two heads are better than one! Allow students to go places where they can collaborate. Google Docs is a great place to start, but also explore tools like FlipGrid , a tool that allows students to record and reply to one another.

Provide a safe space for gifted students to take risks without being put down. Gifted students are often timid to answer something they are unsure about because of the social stigma attached to not answering correctly. Create a classroom culture where wrong answers become an opportunity to celebrate different thinking.

Learning Math From Mistakes. QR codes add an interactive component to your classroom. A frog jumps into the pond, splash! Silence again. Use haiku as a way to challenge gifted students to summarize chapters, current events, biographies or vocabulary words. Haiku are student-friendly yet force them to be concise and purposeful with their word choice.

Action is powerful for gifted students. Allowing students to find solutions to problems they see in their school, neighborhood or community will allow them to understand that they can make a difference.

Internalizing that they can be the change in the world is transformational. Watch these TED Talks to show them what kids like them are doing to change the world. Allow gifted students to record their voices into an app or movie application.

Teaching in front of peers is public speaking and that is its own beast. By allowing gifted students to show their work in a way that allows their confidence to be present is a win-win. Explain Everything is a collaborative and interactive whiteboard tool that makes this approach a piece of cake! They have original ideas. A child with giftedness is an original thinker and able to access abstract reasoning and bring together ideas from different areas. These examples of creative work can contain complex language and show an advanced appreciation for humour.

They are cognitively advanced and able to self-teach new skills. Children who are gifted may teach themselves how to read and write before they learn in school. They often have advanced cognitive reasoning skills and a good memory. Some estimates suggest that an average student needs to hear something repeated times in order to acquire it, whereas a gifted child may only need to encounter a word, fact or idea times.

In Math class, these kids may use logic and reasoning to solve problems before they have been introduced to the target concept. They learn quickly and do not require as much practice as other children to develop new skills. They may easily become bored when a lesson is repetitive and this can lead to them tuning out.

Children with giftedness can often benefit from a condensed curriculum that covers more material in less time. They are sensitive to their environment. From a young age the gifted child is very alert and tuned into his or her environment. Some have acute concentration skills and can easily become hyper-focused on a task.

It is through engaging with new stimuli that they are able to develop cognitively. They have strong feelings. These children may be quite opinionated and have strong feelings about topics that are important to them. They can also be more aware of the opinions and feelings of other people. However, this does not necessarily translate into knowing how to deal with this information through appropriate social channels. They may be quite emotional. This is one reason why parents may choose to move a child into a gifted program where they will have other intellectually advanced kids as peers.

The need for gifted and talented education was first recognized in the late nineteenth century shortly after the development of intelligence testing. The first gifted school was opened in Worcester, Massachusetts in the early s and today gifted classes, programs and schools exist across the United States.

Students are typically nominated for screening, tested to determine the extent and areas of their giftedness and then placed in an appropriate program. There are also cases in which gifted children stand out because of poor academic achievement. This is often surprising for parents to learn as many people assume that giftedness is always associated with high performance.

Yet it is possible for a learning disability to overshadow giftedness. There can be giftedness in one subject, such as Math, but a learning disability that affects performance in other areas of the curriculum. Children with learning difficulties and giftedness may benefit from programs that help them focus and stay on task, while developing vocabulary and literacy skills at the same time.

Touch-type Read and Spell is a touch-typing program that uses a phonics based approach to reinforce reading and spelling skills and teach typing and English vocabulary to children and adults, including those with dyslexia , dyspraxia , dysgraphia , ADD and ADHD.

As an illustrative example, extremely bright dyslexic children may be articulate, but struggle to write in a way that reflects the extent of their knowledge or vocabulary.

They may choose the simplest and shortest way to express themselves in writing because they are overwhelmed with the number of directions their composition can take.