I’m on the board of a parent support group for gifted students in our district. We have about 200 members, and lots of activities.
One of the other board members does OM, and she thinks it is great. That takes a lot of time, and might be the focus of your program if you are interested.
We also have two activies for the kids (a lot of our stuff is talks for parents, and assistance in dealing with schools. Our district GATE Coordinator works closely with us.) The first is a game night, where we just provide the opportunity for GATE kids from various schools to play games with each other. My wife was a toy reviewer, so we were able to bootstrap it with a lot of our stock. Not all were inellectual games - some kids liked chess, but some liked silly things like Loopin’ Louie. We also have parents bring games. We have it a month before Christmas, so parents can get some ideas.
The second is a GATE Olympics, which consists of stations with various puzzles and logic problems. The kids go from station to station and collect stamps. It is non-competitive. We don’t give out prizes, but the challenge of getting the ticket filled up with stamps is enough.
The philosophy in our district is differentiation. Most schools don’t have pull out classes. Some schools have lots of GATE students, but some have only a handful. Differentiation is trying to make sure that kids who know spelling words off the bat, say, don’t have to write them 10 times. The GATE coordinator also tries to guard against assignming more homework as a substitute for enrichment.
Besides games and OM, and the good suggestions already give, how about some sort of research project that would be fun. It would let the kids go into things in more depth than they can do for their classes, be on something they would like to do, and allow all sorts of creativity in the presentation. Maybe you can get some recognition from your district, perhaps get the kids scheduled to show their work at a school board meeting or something.
California has a state GATE support group. Does your state have one? They may have ideas also.
I have to say that I honestly don’t know if we have such a support group. This definitely gives me something to look into though. Thanks for the suggestions, and the great insight. You must feel fortunate that you live in such a great district.
What I wish I had as a ‘gifted’ kid, especially when I was in my really younger years, is the ‘How not to be labeled a nerd and get your ass kicked every day.’ class.
Whatever it is you do for gifted kids, you’ve gotta make sure that you also include a dose of fitting in with other kids their own age who aren’t gifted. It’s tough to go through life as a gifted kid, at least for some of us, and some of us needed to be taught that we could do other things aside from research, problem solving, and mind puzzles.
Well, then good luck to you. Tough is good, encouraging learning is even better.
My suggestion is make the learning fun, and try to make life long learners. I work in a constantly changing field, and I (now) feel cheated if I don’t learn a new thing each day.
Email me if you’d like some challenging problems for the kids. I work for free if it’s fun, and I can give real life examples of math problems including day to day currency fluctuation, taxes, and as an added bonus, geography.