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The fast-track plan for high achievers is a good initiative but in doing so, the specific needs of ‘gifted’ children should also be given equal attention.

FOR THE past year, I have lobbied for educational acceleration, for gifted children, on behalf of and with, the National Association for Gifted Children, Malaysia (NAGCM).

Most recently, I spoke up for educational acceleration in a speech at the National Education Dialogue at Shah Alam, Selangor. I seemed to have “struck a chord”, because my short speech attracted rousing applause.

I was pleasantly surprised to find so many people in the audience, supportive of such a gifted education initiative.

Now, I learn that the government is going to implement an acceleration programme aimed at “high achievers”. This will involve one year of acceleration at the beginning of primary school and another year, in secondary school.

This will mean that “high achieving” school leavers might be just 16 years old, having had up to two years of acceleration.

This is a heartening initiative, since it goes some way to addressing the need for gifted children, to be given a suitably stimulating environment.

Yet, I must note an assumption that has been made. I understand that the initiative is aimed at the top 15% of students who are described as “high achievers”.

The material I have read suggests that this will address the needs of gifted children.

However, what has not been understood, is that gifted children are NOT necessarily high achievers. They are, quite often, in fact, underachievers.

A gifted child may be extraordinarily intelligent — but very ordinary in school performance, or, indeed, below average in school performance, if their needs are not being met.

Boredom

A gifted child, who underachieves, may be doing so out of sheer boredom. An education that does not meet their intellectual needs, will tend to “switch them off”. Such a child will be overlooked by any system that deliberately selects the top 15% of “high achievers”.

What is needed, therefore, is a system that tests all children for evidence of giftedness, or at least, all children that a teacher, or parent, brings to the attention of the educational system, as a potentially gifted child. Once identified, such children could be offered suitable acceleration.

There is another potential pitfall with the proposed system of acceleration: two years of acceleration may be enough for the moderately gifted, or thereabouts (with IQs of 130 or more), but it may not be enough for the more gifted students of significantly greater intellectual endowment.

This scheme, therefore, is a step forward, but may not be enough of a step for a small subset of gifted children.

by Valentine Cawley.

Read more @ http://thestar.com.my/education/story.asp?file=/2012/9/23/education/12045481&sec=education

TALENT without opportunity achieves nothing. This is the problem facing all gifted people, in society: how will a gifted person find or create opportunities appropriate to that gift?

The greater the gift, the more rarefied the opportunity needs to be, to allow that gift to flourish.

Thus, the gifted person is confronted with an awkward conundrum: the more profound their gifts, the more unlikely it is that they will find the necessary opportunities to allow them to flourish.

There is another problem facing all gifted people in society.

A gifted person is one whose intellectual capacity is greater than the norm.

A moderately gifted person (the lowest level of “gifted”), with an IQ of 130, occurs with a rarity of one person in 44 in a population with a mean IQ of 100 and standard deviation of 15. That means they are brighter than 97.7% of the population.

Posing problems

Even at this low level of giftedness, the moderately gifted person faces discrimination of a different kind: the person presiding over any opportunity, job or a special situation, is not likely to be as bright as he or she is.

This presents a very real problem, as we shall see later.

However, the problem is even more acute for higher levels of giftedness.

The highly gifted person, with an IQ of 145, occurs with a rarity of one person in 741.

This means they are brighter than almost 99.9% of the population.

At this level it is almost certain that anyone empowered to decide over their fate, with respect to any opportunity, is not as bright as they are.

The exceptionally gifted person, with an IQ of 160 or more, occurs with a rarity of one person in 31,560. They are brighter than 99.997% of the population.

At this level, it is quite possible to live out one’s life, and never meet another person as bright.

Needless to say, anyone deciding on whether to offer them an opportunity, or not, is very likely to be less intelligent than they are.

Read more @ http://thestar.com.my/education/story.asp?file=/2012/9/2/education/11921793&sec=education

One characteristic of gifted children is advanced language ability, which means these children reach developmental milestones relating to language earlier than developmental charts would indicate. This means that gifted children tend to talk earlier, have larger vocabularies, and use longer sentences than non-gifted children.

How can parents tell if their child’s language development is advanced? A first step is to look at typical language developmental milestones. A second step is to look at what advanced language development is.

Language Developmental Milestones

At three months, a child:

• Makes cooing and gurgling sounds

At six months, a child:

• Babbles and makes sing-song sounds

At twelve months, a child:

• Babbles, but with inflection, which sounds like talking
• Says first word

At eighteen months, a child:

• Says 8-10 words others can understand
• Has vocabulary of about 5 to 40 words, mostly nouns
• Repeats words heard in conversation
• Uses “hi,” “bye,” and “please” when reminded

At two years, a child:

• Has a vocabulary of 150 to 300 words
• Uses 2-3 word sentences, usually in noun-verb combinations, such as “Dog bark,” but also using inflection with combinations like “More cookie?”
• Refers to self by name and uses “me” and “mine”

At three years, a child:

• Uses 3-5 word sentences
• Asks short questions, usually using “what” or “where.”
• Has a vocabulary of about 900-1000 words

At four years, a child:

• Has a vocabulary of about 1,500 to 2,500 words
• Uses sentences of 5 or more words

At five years, a child:

• Identifies some letters of the alphabet
• Uses 6 words in a sentence
• Uses “and,” “but,” and “then” to make longer sentence

By age six, a child’s language begins to sound like adult speech, including the use of complex sentences, with words like “when,” for example. However, children tend not to use sentences with “although” and “even though” until about age 10.

Advanced Language Development

Early Talking
Gifted children tend to begin talking early. While most children say their first word at around one year of age, gifted children may begin speaking when they are nine months old. Some parents report that their children said their first word even earlier than that, as early as six months of age.

Some parents have even reported that their children tried very hard to form words at three months! However, most babies are simply not physically developed sufficiently to control their mouths, tongue, and lips well enough to make the speech sounds they need. They may purse their lips and nearly turn blue with the effort and then become quite frustrated when they can’t make the sounds they want to make.

Teaching babies sign language is a good way to help these children express themselves without vocalization.

It’s important to note that not all gifted children speak early. In fact, some gifted children are late talkers, not talking until they are two years old or even older. When they do speak, however, they sometimes skip over the stages of language development and may begin speaking in full sentences. While early talking is a sign of giftedness, not speaking early is not an indication that a child is not gifted.

Advanced Vocabulary
An advanced vocabulary can mean two different things. It can mean the number of words a child uses and it can mean the types of words a child uses.

While a non-gifted child may have a vocabulary of 150-300 words at age two, gifted children may have surpassed the 100 word mark by the time they are eighteen months old. At eighteen months, most children have a vocabulary of from five to twenty words, although some do reach the fifty-word milestone by the time they are two years old. In their second year, most children increase their vocabulary to up to 300 words. Gifted children, however, will have a larger working vocabulary, approaching that of a four year old or even older children.

The other type of advanced vocabulary refers to the types of words a child has in his or her vocabulary. Typically, the first words a child learns will be nouns: mama, daddy, dog, ball, bird, etc. After that, simple verbs are added, for example, want, go, see, give. Gifted children, however, will be adding connecting words, such as and or even because. By age three, gifted children might also have added transitional words, such as however or multisyllabic words like appropriate.

Sentence Structures
A typical two-year old can construct sentences of two or three words, often without a verb. For example, a child might say, “There cat” for “There is a cat.” A gifted child, however, will often be able to speak in fuller sentences at age two and by age three, their language may already resemble adult speech. They are able to use time markers, like now, later, first, and then, which, along with their advanced vocabulary and more complete sentences, allow them to carry on full conversations with adults.

Although most gifted children have this kind of advanced language development, its absence does not mean a child is not gifted. The range of normal language development is also as widely variable in gifted children as it is in the non-gifted population. These descriptions of what might be typical in a gifted child are meant to help parents understand what advanced language ability looks like.

by Carol Bainbridge.

Read more @ http://giftedkids.about.com/od/gifted101/a/language_use.htm

If you’re the parent of a gifted child, you know that your child is not quite like the other kids. Sure, your child enjoys playing, argues with siblings, and resists completing chores, just like any other kid. However, there are some things gifted kids do and say that you are pretty sure other kids don’t say and do.

For example, my son loved to learn about outer space and the solar system. He was an early reader and read all he could about that subject. One night, when he was around four years old, he couldn’t sleep. He came to me quite upset because he had just read that Polaris would no longer be the North Star in 2000 years. I’m pretty sure other kids don’t lose sleep over the fate of Polaris.

And then there were the many times when my verbally gifted son would correct other people’s grammar. At age five, he was quite the expert and disliked it when people made grammar mistakes. If someone said something like “Everyone should pick up their trash,” my little five-year-old would say, “Everyone should pick up HIS OR HER trash.”

I could give many such examples as could most parents of gifted kids. These kinds of stories help people understand that while gifted kids are kids, they often act and think differently from other kids. As a result, being the parent of a gifted child is a bit different than being the parent of a non-gifted child.

Imagine someone asked you, “How do you know you’re the parent of a gifted kid?” How would you answer that question?

Here are a couple of ways I’d answer that question:

You know you’re the parent of a gifted kid when your four-year-old corrects an adult who confused a Brontosaurus with a Brachiosaurus, explaining how to tell the difference between the two, further explaining that the proper name for a Brontosaurus is Apatosaurus.

You know you’re the parent of a gifted kid when your six-year old answers the question of a museum visitor about the constellation Cassiopeia that the museum guide couldn’t answer.

These short stories can help parents of non-gifted kids better understand what gifted kids are like and what it’s like to be the parent of one.

by Carol Bainbridge.

Read more @ http://giftedkids.about.com/od/familylife/qt/parents_know.htm

Many people believe that it is not good to tell children they are gifted because it will cause the children to get an inflated ego. The children could become arrogant and intolerant of others. These people also believe that children who are told they are gifted can develop socialization problems and become isolated from others.

Some of these people even disapprove of the term gifted since they feel it implies a child has a “gift,” something that other children do not have. This feeling stems from a belief that all children are equal and is the same feeling that leads some people to believe that all children are gifted.

The truth is that gifted children sense at a very young age that they are not like other children. They can easily misinterpret their feelings of being different as something negative, often seeing themselves as flawed in some way, as having something wrong with them. It can come as a great relief to gifted children to learn that they are not flawed and that there is a reason they feel different.

Gifted children can often feel quite isolated and alone and develop social problems because of their being different. They may have a hard time making friends or they may feel misunderstood and disliked. In most cases, gifted children have these problems only in school settings where they are forced to create friendships with their age mates. Children who have problems socializing with other children in school generally have no trouble making and maintaining friendships with older children or with other gifted children.

Telling a child he or she is gifted will not make a child feel different; chances are that child is already feeling different, and discussing giftedness will help that child understand those feelings. Pretending it doesn’t exist will not make it go away any more than pretending a disability doesn’t exist will make that disability go away.

Your gifted child may find one of these books helpful in helping him or her understand giftedness:

by Carol Bainbridge.

Read more @ http://giftedkids.about.com/od/socialemotionalissues/a/tell_children.htm

Definition: Intelligence

There are probably as many definitions of intelligence as there are experts who study it. Simply put, however, intelligence is the ability to learn about, learn from, understand, and interact with one’s environment. This general ability consists of a number of specific abilities, which include these specific abilities:

• Adaptability to a new environment or to changes in the current environment
• Capacity for knowledge and the ability to acquire it
• Capacity for reason and abstract thought
• Ability to comprehend relationships
• Ability to evaluate and judge
• Capacity for original and productive thought

Additional specific abilities might be added to the list, but they would all be abilities allowing a person to learn about, learn from, understand, and interact with the environment. Environment in this definition doesn’t mean the environment of the earth, such as the desert, the mountains, etc., although it can mean that kind of environment. It has a wider meaning that includes a person’s immediate surroundings, including the people around him or her. Environment in this case can also be something as small as a family, the workplace, or a classroom.

by Carol Baindridge.

Read more @ http://giftedkids.about.com/od/glossary/g/intelligence.htm

Q: There are a number of checklists to identify gifted children, identification is an easy task — comparatively. But how should one maintain that the “giftedness” continues to “grow” in the child.

p/s. keep in mind that this is regarding Indian children.

A: The biggest loss of potential is when they burn out. One must also realize that giftedness is for life, but the extent to which it is demonstrated over time would depend on how their potential is nurtured. It also depends on how giftedness is viewed. One may think that their child is no longer gifted when his/her grades slip. We must be aware that gifted students may not always test well. It really depends on how a gifted child views testing. If he/she does not see a purpose and meaning to testing, s/he may not test well, much to the disappointment of adults, namely parents and teachers.

Gifted children need differentiation in learning; hence teaching techniques used should promote higher order and creative thinking which enhances the staying power and passion for learning. They need to be interested in what they learn and not merely studying for good grades – otherwise they may burn out. In other words, gifted children are more intrinsically motivated.

There are indeed two categories of high achievers – one that is high achieving alone but not gifted; and one that is both gifted and high achieving. The high achiever will score A’s by working hard and memorizing facts for extrinsic reasons whereas the gifted would do well due to intrinsic motivation by simply enjoying learning. To ensure giftedness is demonstrated, gifted children need learning beyond classroom teaching. They also need to be interested and kept interested in what they learn to achieve long term goals. Help the child think about the future so they are able to develop a vision to in turn, help them engage in learning for a purpose.

Giftedness is universal in most cases. As long as educational experiences are quite standard, racial differences should not make a difference; most of the differences would be due to the kind of nurturing and environment the child is in.

by Inderbir Kaur Sandhu, Ph.D

Read more @ http://giftedkids.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=giftedkids&cdn=parenting&tm=280&f=20&su=p284.9.336.ip_p504.3.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.brainy-child.com/expert/early-signs-giftedness.shtml