These are really wonderful posts - I wish I had time to quote & reply to each one, but I’ve got to leave here shortly. Dangermom, “ramble” on, anytime; you know I value your opinion – I always wait for the “Danger Duo” to show up when I post these mommification threads.
I’ll really keep in mind what everyone’s saying about helping them learn to be patient. That is excellent advice. Whatever emotional state they’re in tends to escalate as they feed off each other, and my daughter is very impatient (and has been since infancy - boy was she pissed at not being able to roll over!). So we stop, sit, hands together, breathe deeply, then speak calmly. Works about 15% of the time, but hey, it’s a start.
I don’t know what my son’s gift is, but this was so funny last night — I was flipping through People at the table, kids climbing on chairs and on me. But since my daughter was pointing at all the pretty ladies, saying “That looks like Mommy”, I wasn’t about to stop them. . Then I get to the picture of Britney Spears & KFed, and ds says “Hold on. Wait a minute. Just stop here. Just look here a minute.” So I tore out her picture (explaining that only Mommy is allowed to do this) and gave it to him. He folded the page carefully, held it against his tummy, and said, “I ready to go bed now.”
My older son (now 23) was identified as gifted at an early age.
I agree the giftededness is very different from being an early bloomer or ahead of the curve.
What I remember most of elementary school was our kid’s impatience with others and, related to that, the frustration he experienced socially. It’s not that he had no friends, but he definitely could clash with kids who were not on his wavelength. Middle school was rough. Most of the trouble he had was with cliquish g/t kids.
Things improved when he went to high school, and going off to college was the best thing that ever happened to him.
While I agree that talking down to your child, gifted or not, is not advisable, I also think that it is important to remember that no matter how bright a child is, he or she should not be treated like a little adult. I think that I occasionally fell into that, and it was a mistake on my part to approach just any old subject with him, simply because he was so verbal…sometimes that sophistication is an awfully thin veneer.
There is so much great advice and so many great insights in this thread! I’d be writing all day (and boring you all to tears) if I responded to everything I wanted to, but…
Absolutely! No one ever learns critical thinking and discernment by only being exposed to the “good stuff”. A smart person can get something out everything. Once a kid is in the habit of thinking, they don’t *stop * thinking while they’re watching The Fairly Oddparents. In sixth grade, my daughter wrote an extra-credit paper about messianic themes in the Harry Potter books. Kids think and learn FOR FUN, and they’re doing it all the time. That love of learning is much more nurtured when a kid delights in recognizing some subtext in an Artemis Fowl book than it would be by struggling through Great Expectations before she’s ready for it.
I actually logged on this morning to post a new thread but this one is right on…
Our youngest (of three daughters) started out young and skipped to third grade half way thru second grade. She is now 12 years 4 months and in 8th grade. She is still taking advanced classes and doing well academically but is having emotional problems.
To top things off, as the youngest of the three at home, she is faced with some of the same treatment from her sisters. Although it’s surely not as bad, she’s able to blow up at home like she can’t at school.
So, Lucas rips a nice big piece of packing tape off of a package we’d recently received. I go “Oooh, fun!” and settle in to watch. He tries to put it down. Fails. He pulls it off with the other hand and tries to put it down. Fails. He looks at me. He pulls the tape off with the other hand and then presses the tape on the carpet. And then goes back to ripping more tape off the box. It was mildly disappointing.
We’ll see how he tests out when he’s older. I’m dreading sending him to school in a few years because I fully expect them to murdalize any interest he has in learning.
One thing that helped me was about that age I started getting pulled from some regular classrooms to help “teach” in lower grades once a week. I taught high potential (that was what is was called back then) third graders and forth graders. We did units on genetics and theatre and led Junior Great Books.
For some reason, dealing with kids emotionally younger than I was helped give me confidence for the emotionally older.
I also started doing more out of school enrichment activities - a summer school gifted program, community theatre with grown ups.
For reference, there are 26 kids in my son’s second grade class. Six of them are tagged as gifted. We aren’t talking about the “long tail” here. Most of these kids aren’t geniuses. They aren’t - generally - that exceptional. And as they go through life and life starts self segregating a little (the ones without a gift for math don’t tend to end up in Engineering school - so when you get to college as a Engineering major, you discover EVERYONE around you is good at math), they get less exceptional.
I was standout bright when I had 20 kids in my first grade class. I’m not standout bright on the Dope or around my friends - around here I’m a little on the stupid side.
Which is one of the reasons I think its important not to treat these kids as particularly exceptional. Because they really aren’t.
I firmly believe the best thing a parent can do is teach the child to read at an early age and encourage them to read anything and everything they can get their hands on. My dad did this with me, and it was the single biggest and bestest thing he ever did. I lived for our weekly trips to the bookstore and he never tried to talk me out of reading anything. He would occasionally ask me if I was sure I wanted a particular book if it looked like it was way over my head, but that was it.
Summer school gifted programs (CTY, for example, though that’s a bit down the road) are very useful. Interacting with (and knowing that there are) other children like them is great for social development.
Here is a short articleon levels of giftedness and stuff, based on IQ points–the end is the interesting part. Generally, 130 is the approximate cutoff for school gifted programs. [Wildly unscientific generalization] After 140 or so, kids have a hard time fitting in with others their age, and after 160, it can be very difficult to help them find enough to do and they need a lot of special support and space to grow. [/wildly unscientific generalization]
I would not say that my kids are anything more than pretty bright, at the lower end of the gifted range. There’s no way I’m having them tested anytime soon, but that can be helpful for people with obviously profoundly gifted kids who need assistance in figuring out how to help them. But my kids don’t really stand out all that much; most of their friends are nice, bright kids too and seem just fine to me.
I agree with everything Voyager said about letting them do what they want.
And, 1010011010, have you got a plan on how to stop school from murdalizing your kid’s love of learning?
Maybe this was just a smug joke, but it really doesn annoy me. Yeah, there’s a certain amount of my ego invested in the label, but I think glib assertions that it’s just “parental pride” or the nostalgic gloss of memory are unfair and unwarranted. There are kids, like I was, that need special circumstances to deal with special issues. Some of these special circumstances include an accelerated course load and more chances for in-depth learning on subjects.
Would you say parental pride was the reason why I spent 90% of my time from first grade to fifth grade reading in the back of the room, because I got my classwork and homework done in fifteen minutes? Due to this issue, I was accelerated from fifth grade into a five year high school program in my area. There were sixty students accepted in my freshman year after a fairly rigorous entrance exam, the largest entering class ever. I graduated with thirty other seniors in 2000, after our class set the highest average ACT scores in school history (28 if memory serves). Given the environment I succeeded in, where half my class did not, do you think I would’ve fit into an average high school environment?
Nah, that joke didn’t bother me a bit – s/he’s (can’t remember) far too correct to take offense.
At 20 things look one way, as you see the race ahead and imagine where you might be; at 40, a lot of the game has been played already. Some people have won, some people have lost, and we all have a lot more in common. “The smarts” don’t matter near as much as we might like…
I think people do place a whole lot of unnecessary significance in the “gifted” label. This is not to deny the existence of children who have special needs because of their precocious cognitive skills. But I think in general, most kids that are called gifted are bright kids who are naturally good test takers. Beyond that, from what I’ve seen in my K-12 educational experience, there is little else that makes them different than regular kids.
Growing up, I had the opportunity to see how both sides lived. As monstro mentioned in her first post, my sister and I were odd in that were smart and intellectually curious, as well as exceptionally creative from an early age. Neither one of us were formally placed in the gifted program, though. But every year, when the “gifted” kids were assigned the project of writing a book, my twin and I were invited to participate, because our teachers recognized our talents and interests in this area. This involvement let me see exactly what special things went on in the gifted program, that “non-gifted” kids were not exposed to, while being one of those so-called “non-gifted” kids.
It surprised me (and it still does) to see that most of the enrichment activities tapped into the arts, like drama, creative writing and art appreciation. It made me seriously wonder why only the gifted kids were regularly exposed to this type of stuff. To be labled as gifted, one had to have a certain score on a standardized test, but even as a young kid I knew such scores had nothing to do with creativity. It seemed to me that qualification into the gifted program was one thing, while the program emphasized another. That struck me as not quite right.
Interestingly enough, in fifth grade the gifted kids submitted their books for entry into two state-wide contests. As usual, my sister and I joined in. Only a few from my school were selected for competition. One of them was mine. My sister’s was another. Which goes to show that the labels do not determine a kid’s strengths. Not matter if your kids end up testing as gifted or not, treat them like smart kids. Recognize and nurture their interests and talents. Don’t assume that they will be a certain way just because of the label they are given. I’m glad that my teachers gave me and my sister the opportunity to benefit from the gifted program even though we apparently didn’t qualify as gifted, but it’s kind of a shame that it even had to be like that.
Patience is important, yes. But one of the most important things is learning how to match speed with others.
My parents’ parenting style blew goats. Last Saturday Mom floored me by saying out loud that “we pushed you too hard; you were our little girl so you had to be perfect and we would never let any ‘wrongs’ pass”. The school wanted to move me a year or two ahead so I’d be more “on par” with my classmates intelectually but my parents wouldn’t allow it because “I had to learn to socialize with my peers” - then they wouldn’t allow me to play in the park with the other kids… :smack:
I mean, that would have been horrible whether I was gifted or not.
Thing is, the school were I went didn’t have special ed or any of that (it’s a relatively new concept in Spain). And, already in K1, teachers would pair students up so that for example those of us who’d gotten there being able to read helped other kids our size who had serious problems. The girl I was assigned to help was deeply dyslexic, as is all her family; I helped her figure out how to distinguish letters that look similar but also I got it through that “there is nothing wrong with saying ‘I’m not sure if I understand this word right, the way I understand it doesn’t make sense’”. Apparently at age 4 I still hadn’t gotten my habit of never asking for help
Spending several months a year tutoring other kids in this way taught me how to figure out whether other people are undestanding me and which parts of what I say are they having trouble with. I learned a lot about rephrasing and about examples. 34 years later, it’s probably my best professional skill.
My kids were both placed in the program with no testing - just teacher recommendations. I was the same - and there were kids in the gifted programs at school who didn’t get good grades or score well on tests - and kids that did that weren’t gifted . It seems like the teachers in both my case and my kids case took pains to seperate out “bright” from “does well.”
Gifted kids don’t necessarily test well - in fact they often test poorly because they don’t tend to have patience. And often kids who work hard do well in school, but they aren’t necessarily bright. A kid who gets Cs but never cracks a book and is struggling with ADHD may be more “gifted” than a kid who gets As but spends five hours a night studying.
Our schools also tagged “gifted” as meaning different things. We had kids who were gifted artists - but not good readers or good at math. It was understood that gifts came in different flavors - you may have a gift for writing but none for science. You may be a gifted athelete. Now, the programs available for gifted atheletes were extracurricular (we did have some stuff available in arts and music on more of a statewide level shortly after I graduated that still exist), but gifted meant more than “smart.”
Wow, I think that’s great. There didn’t seem to be much diversity in “flavors” of giftedness, at my schools. I actually don’t know how kids were placed in the gifted program. It could have been scores or it could have been based on teacher recommendation (via parental influence…I think there may have been a political component to placement as well). But it seemed like a one-size fits all approach for the most part. Which makes no sense.
. Then I get to the picture of Britney Spears & KFed, and ds says “Hold on. Wait a minute. Just stop here. Just look here a minute.” So I tore out her picture (explaining that only Mommy is allowed to do this) and gave it to him. He folded the page carefully, held it against his tummy, and said, “I ready to go bed now.”