Ever Think Your Own Giftedness is Frustrating Your Gifted Child?

The question in the above blog title grabbed me, as most of my job is working, supporting the parents of gifted children. I'm not going to comment it, except to encourage you to think about it. The link to the blog from GiftedUniverse is below if you want to read the whole article.

"If you have a gifted child, it is most likely that either you or your child’s other parent are gifted yourselves. Probably both of you. And if you are gifted than the traits and qualities associated with YOUR giftedness also affect your gifted child. YOUR high energy level. YOUR emotional sensitivity. YOUR difficulty in finding a peer whether as a child or now. YOUR intensity. Yet if you read much of what is written about parenting a gifted child, it assumes the relationship is unidirectional: gifted child and their impact on the parent(s) rather than a reciprocal relationship...." by ELISA on NOVEMBER 12, 2009,

HTTP://GIFTEDUNIVERSE.COM/PARENTS-GIFTED-CHILDREN/EVER-THINK-YOUR-OWN-GIFTEDNESS-IS-FRUSTRATING-YOUR-GIFTED-CHILD/

20 Tips for Nurturing Gifted Children by Bertie Kingore

I came across this article on-line and thought it had some good ideas. Bertie's website is: http://www.bertiekingore.com/index.htm

Kingore, B. (2008). 20 Tips for nurturing gifted children. GIFTED EDUCATION COMMUNICATOR. California Association for the Gifted, Summer, 2008.

1. Appreciate gifted learners as children. Just as all children do, they need love, friendship, reasonable standards of behavior, responsibility, time management skills, free time, and creative pursuits. They need your involvement in their development of independence. Appreciate them for who they are rather than who they may become.

2. Interact with families with gifted children. Gifted children seek interest-mates and intellectual-peers as well as age peers. You may also find solace interacting with another parent who lives with and loves a gifted child.

3. Recognize how the personal and instructional needs of a gifted child differ from others. Gifted students require intellectual peers who understand more abstract ideas and get their jokes. They learn best when instruction is at a pace and level that respond to their accelerated readiness to learn.

4. Appreciate the differences among high achievers, gifted learners, and creative thinkers. Skim the accompanying chart that compares high achievers, gifted learners, and creative thinkers, and ponder which column or combinations of columns best fits your child. Consider discussing the chart with your children to elicit their perceptions.

5. Understand the developmental crises for gifted students. Linda Silverman cautions that gifted students experience uneven development, underachievement often related to a lack of curriculum challenge, conflict between achievement and popularity, and difficulty selecting a career due to multipotentiality. Access her web site for further information.

6. Assure your child that being different is okay. Gifted children can feel disconnected from age peers who interpret so differently. Help them appreciate individual differences in others and themselves. Provide a place where it is safe for children to be themselves.

7. Be an encourager. A parent uniquely understands the whole child as you view your child in multiple scenarios over an extended period of time. As an encourager, validate your child’s worth and goals as you encourage passions for learning.

8. Emphasize that what is learned is more important than any grade. Interact enthusiastically as your child shares school work with you. Rather than focus upon the grade, prompt your child’s response with: Tell me about what you learned doing this? Draw a star by something you did well or liked doing.

9. Be an active listener and elicit children’s perceptions. Strive to understand their messages and feelings rather than too quickly respond to their words. Insure that children know you respect them and are genuinely interested in their information. Power struggles can be deferred with a request for their view instead of a barrage of our answers. What do you think we can do about this? How do you feel about it? Why do you think that happened?

10. Follow their interests and leads in learning situations rather than pressure them with your agenda. Our goals may not be their goals. Consult them on issues affecting them whenever you believe they understand the consequences.

11. Talk up to them. Advanced vocabularies lead to higher comprehension and achievement.

12. Enjoy music, plays, museums, art, sports, and historical places together and discuss the experience. These shared cultural experiences give family members warm memories to talk about over the years.

13. Model life-long learning habits. Talk about current events and volunteer with your child to help others. Our actions may model more than our words.

14. Facilitate real-life reading, writing, science, and math experiences. Get library cards and go to the library together. Enjoy browsing. Help children find good books and materials in the areas in which they express interest. Start at an early age to shop together with a list and a budget, write thank you notes and invitations, and plan the area and plants for a garden. One gifted sixth grader expressed sincere appreciation for geometry skills after working with his father to plot a patio space and cover.

15. Give books and learning games as presents, and then spend time together reading and playing those games. Research supports that reading and playing card and board games increases vocabulary, math skills, comprehension, and critical thinking skills.

16. Recognize that gifted children need to question and respond critically. They sometimes are impatient with conventions, such as spelling, grammar, rules, and even patience for others. Talk frankly about the importance of conventions without stifling their creativity and spirit.

17. Maintain a sense of humor! As a parent, every day we can choose to laugh or cry.

AT SCHOOL...

18. Support school efforts to differentiate and provide services for advanced and

gifted children. Consider attending school in-service programs on differentiation and the needs of gifted children.

19. As appropriate, supply home perspectives and feedback on your child’s well- being, responses to learning, and interests. No matter what our occupations, I have always believed that our children are our greatest work.

20. Be an advocate more than an advisory.

REFERENCES

Kingore, B. (2004). Differentiation: Simplified, realistic, and effective. Austin, TX: Professional Associates Publishing.

Silverman, L.K. (2000). Counseling the gifted and talented. Denver, CO: Love Publishing.

Silverman, Linda Kreger Silverman. Web site. http://www.gifteddevelopment.com *Kingore, B. (2008). 20 Tips for nurturing gifted children. GIFTED EDUCATION COMMUNICATOR. California Association for the Gifted, Summer, 2008. In Press.

Empty Space to Become & the value of Futility

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend a day listening to Dr. Gordon Neufeld speak. WOW. I've put link up on left to his website and I would recommend buying a book or DVD. He spoke about an issue that is huge in gifted kids - how easily they are wounded and how negative behaviour is born from that wounding.

Let me hit you with a few highlights though, that relate to the kids we are working with.

Gifted kids are often are often highly praised. Not so helpful. If a child is internally motivated, praise will shut them down. Instead of praise and reinforcement and high structure, these children need "empty spaces to become".

They need:

• room for initiative, creative and originality.
• to be placed in charge of their learning whenever possible

You (parents and teachers) need to:

• provide options and solicit intentions to get them into the Driver's seat
• give interest the lead when providing information
• generate questions before providing answers
• provide opportunities for experimentation and exploration
• not preempt intrinsic motivation with praise rewards and incentives. (from his notes)

The other thing that really hit me from this presentation was Neufeld's admonition that we, as teachers and parents need to be "Agents of Futility and Angels of Comfort" at the same time.

Many gifted children will try and reason themselves out of a "No" that is a firm "no". They will engage you in unending argument or withdraw ("I didn't want that item/experience anyway"). Neufeld's point is that in order to adapt, learn from your experiences and failures, gain resourcefulness and resiliency, you need to feel a No and understand it emotionally, not understand it intellectually. You need to be brought to tears over the futility of the experience, not allowed to argue your way out of it or wear their parent down. But that futility, that "No" should not alienate the child from their parent, which is where the "angels of comfort" come in. Comforting as you say no. You don't explain the No, which takes it to that intellectual level, you just stick to it and sympathize with the child's frustration.

Neufeld points out that those tears of futility have enough toxins in them to kill a small rodent. Which is why you feel better afterwards. I find this fascinating.

The other point I took was that Gifted kids are often born sensitive. It is a huge challenge to keep their hearts soft, and attached to their parents. If that fails, you often have behavioural issues.

Attachment goes into the importance for children to be primarily attached to and dependant on "tempered" adults rather than "untempered" peers, for the protection of their own hearts.

And as always, Neufeld promotes finding islands of competence and building on the positive rather than focusing on the negative.

Just to whet your appetite....buy the book or DVD!

Motivation (or the Lack Thereof)

I've gotten to thinking about achievement and motivation with Gifted kids. A number of the students I'm working with this year really struggle with this and it seems worth-while to explore why these kids, for whom learning is "so easy", should struggle so with getting their learning for school completed.

From my reading (in this case, largely from the Alberta Special Education department) and my experience around giftedness, some of the factors around lack of motivation or achievement may include: perfectionism, a lack of clear relationship between effort and outcome, low self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, and a sense of low personal control over one's own life. The factors that contribute include emotional issues, inappropriate curriculum, poor self-regulation concerns.

It has been suggested that positive reinforcement and relationships with adults make a difference, along with interest-based curriculum, a focus on strength, self-selected topics, mutual respect and addressing real-world problems.

In would be great if these gifted kids could select and shape their own topics and outcomes and make the learning as real to their specific and immediate needs as possible.

This year, with gifted kids, I have seen some shut down because of motivation - if they can't see the point, they won't do it - I would go so far as to almost say - can't do it. They will have to believe it is important and interesting before they put in any time at all. It is a different challenge from students with your regular need for learning services - these children can learn, they just won't. That is, they won't learn what we say is important on a timeline that we say is reasonable. They are often very very bright and are learning lots, but it is what is important to them and on their own timeline. Much like adults.

Often gifted kids are computer wizards, or read everything, or dance or sing, or play an instrument or make movies or cartoons - but it is really hard to get them to do school work. Because in their mind (and in reality) school work is "fake-work" or "busy-work". It is practise for real life and these kids would rather skip practise and engage life the first time around. They are generally capable enough to make that work for them. Sadly, most of our educational system is not geared to their needs and forcing them to do it our way often will only cause them to disengage.

When I think of motivation and gifted kids this way, not as rebellion or laziness, it makes a lot more sense to me. They may the be unconventional or perceived as unreasonable, but as George Bernard Shaw put it: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Home Schooling With Joy

Sarah Bennett is one of the founders of HCOS, a homeschooling mom, the mother of gifted children and a member of the schools Gifted Committee. This article is included on our blog site with her permission and was originally included in the HCOS newsletter, January 2010. Thanks Sarah, for your inspiring thoughts. Carmen

by Sarah Bennett

Ecclesiastes 8:15 talks about joy accompanying us in our work through all the days of our lives. I love that idea. And I also think it’s central to homeschooling. How can we teach without joy? How can our kids learn without joy? What is the point of carrying on, day after day, if there is no joy in the work that we do?

I think that things start to fall apart when joy is left out of the planning process. I’ve experienced that myself. We had a minor homeschool crisis about six weeks ago. I wasn’t having any fun. My thirteen year old daughter was definitely not having any fun – and I was ready to send her off to school. I even checked the bus routes to see what time she’d have to leave the next morning.

We ended up in that place because my planning had left joy out. Instead, I had more goals. I knew that Abbie was academically capable of the work. I also knew that it fit into our schedule. And it was good work; worthwhile work. Work that would prepare her for things to come. Unfortunately, my view was too narrow. It was my husband who pointed out the error and steered me towards a solution. Instead of sending her to school we decided that for six weeks we would radically change everything. We shelved everything except for math and then supported and encouraged Abbie as she worked on a project. She spent those weeks writing and researching and now she’s putting everything together in a website. Beyond all of the school related stuff she learned while completing her project, she was able to experience joy in learning again. Her excitement was fun to watch. She has delighted in her project.

I allowed the boys (9 and 7) to work on their own project during this time. We did a big unit study on our back yard. We used photos (many of them were actually taken by Jacob) of animals and birds that live in our yard, they painted, wrote poetry, wrote a story, researched habitats and animal behavior, looked at how God designed each animal to survive in this environment, learned about Christian stewardship of the environment and drew out food chains. All of this was scrapbooked and best of all…it was fun! They boys took great joy in their project and you can see the pride and joy on their faces when they show someone their book. This was a great reminder to me about how simple it really is to approach our homeschooling in a way that cultivates joy. Having fun and being joyful in our work doesn’t mean that we don’t work hard , it just means I have to be a little more creative.

I don’t want my kids slogging through their school work. I don’t want my teenager up late every night trying to complete her work. I don’t want my kids to miss out on the opportunities that time and flexibility have opened up. And so, as I plan to get back to the rest of our subjects in the new year, I’m making sure that joy is a central component of our studies. I’m a goal oriented person, so this is hard for me. I’ve had to sit back in the past six weeks and look at where we’re at academically and where I’d like us to end up by June – and then I ask myself why. What happens if we don’t finish our math book? Well, the kids are ahead in math so nothing would actually happen if they didn’t finish their math books. Nothing. We could spend the rest of the year playing math games and doing puzzles and they still wouldn’t be behind (“behind” what, anyway? That’s a whole other conversation). Just writing down that we could play games for the rest of the year and not finish our math books actually makes my eye twitch. I’m not sure I could handle that. But, knowing that we could toss it all and still be just fine gives me a sense of freedom and flexibility. It means that if an opportunity to go out and do something cool comes up I can jump on it and go – we can enjoy it, without worrying about whether we finished math or not.

We’ve been able to enjoy a number of opportunities that I probably would not have made time for if we were still following the schedule that we followed for the first six weeks of school. Abbie has had a couple of significant opportunities open up to her. She has started volunteering at the museum. This is a weekly commitment and takes two hours out of a school day. That’s a big chunk of time and yet, I think it’s going to be more than worth it. And she loves it. It’s something she gets excited about doing. The second opportunity is with Taekwon-do. Abbie’s a black belt in Taekwon-do and really loves to teach. Having some extra flexibility means that she has the time to help teach twice a week, train for more hours, and take advantage of other teaching opportunities that pop up during the week. Her instructor teaches at schools as well and Abbie was able to go with him to an elementary school where she worked with a little girl withspecial needs. The look on Abbie’s face as she told me about how she helped the little girl with Taekwon-do was worth every minute we spent away from our school work that morning. It was even worth the drive from West Kelowna to North Glenmore to pick her up afterwards. I reminded myself that I would have said no if she had asked to help teach on a school morning back in September or October. I would have said no. And Abbie would have completed a lot of subjects that day, but she would have missed out on an experience that taught her more than all of those subjects combined and that allowed her to use her gifts to help others. And isn’t that the true end goal? That we learn to use the gifts that God has given us to help others?

My planning process looks a lot different these days. Sure, we’re jumping back in to a lot of the same things we were doing in the fall, but it’s with a joyful heart. We’re changing a few things, cutting back on a few others, and planning assignments and projects that will bring some of the joy back into our school days. Most importantly, I’m purposely planning in a “do the next thing” way. That means that I can still plan, but not for specific dates. And, if an opportunity comes up and we miss an entire day of school (or even just one subject) we can just pick up where we left off the next day and continue on our way without it throwing a wrench into a carefully crafted schedule.

If you’re having trouble finding the joy in homeschooling, my challenge to you is to pick one thing to change in the new year. Is there a particular subject that just sucks the life out of your homeschool? Change it. Turn it upside-down and approach it from another direction. Do something radical. And have fun! Nurture relationships, help your children discover their God given gifts and give them the opportunity to use them.

I wish you great joy in the New Year.