Emotional Dimensions of gifted children

1. Emotional Dimensions of gifted children Challenges from Within and Without When Gifted Kids Don’t Have All the Answers by Jim Delisle, Ph.D and Judy Galbraith, M.A.,

2. Challenges from Within • Highly perceptive • Highly involved • Super-sensitive • Perfectionist

3. Extra Perception – Having a profound sensitivity to small differences Highly perceptive to stimuli Sounds Sights Smells Touches Tastes Movements Words Patterns Numbers Physical phenomena People

4. High Involvement – an unusual preoccupation with interests, tasks, materials and questions Dream repetitively of treasured problems pictures, patterns or concerns Perceive greater levels of complexity which is interesting and meaningful

5. Uneven Integration – intellectual abilities are out of sync Not exceptional across the board but that may be the expectation and assumption No matter how intelligent, they may struggle with organizing their time, learning environments, assignments and struggle with taking notes May have extremely strong verbal skills but also have a learning disability in reading

6. Challenges from Without • The Eight Great Gripes • No one explains what being gifted is all about-it’s kept a big secret. • School is too easy and too boring. • Parents, teachers, and friends expect us to be perfect all the time. • Friends who really understand us are few and far between. • Kids often tease us about being smart. • We feel overwhelmed by the number of things we can do in life. • We feel different and alienated. • We worry about world problems and fell helpless to do anything about them.

7. Different Ways of Being Gifted,Different Emotional Needs Gifted kids come in all shapes and sizes. Too often we try to fit them into the stereotype of what we think a gifted child should look like.

8. Quantity and Quality of Intelligence There is a difference between a child who has a very high IQ of 150 and a gifted child who has an IQ of 130. We need to offer different levels of support.

9. Accelerated and Enriched Learners • Enriched • Become wholly involved or immersed in a problem • The learning process is more important that accumulating more knowledge • Tend to be reflective and more emotionally mature • Often have a keen sense of humor • Are passionate about a subject, project or cause and pursue it with fierce energy • Accelerated • Interested in mastering/integrating complex material • Learn quickly and recall easily • Highly efficient processors • Crave new information and harder problems • Fulfilled by mastering higher levels of material and application to increasingly difficult problems

10. Other Categories of Giftedness • Gifted Girls • Gifted children from ethnic and cultural minorities • Gifted children with physical and learning differences

11. Support Gifted Girls By: Identify early Encourage higher level math and science Foster friendships with gifted peers with similar interests Avoid sex-role stereo-typing Encourage independence and risk-taking Avoid having different expectations for girls than for boys

12. Ethnic and Cultural Minorities Gifted minority students may not be recognized as talented because their gifts lie in areas that are celebrated by their ethnic group. Tests can be culturally biased. Cultural heritage influences how minority gifted students develop and express their talents.

13. Children with physical and Learning Differences These students are considered to be “Twice-Exceptional” This is a highly underserved population. Sometimes the inability to perform a task is associated with the inability to think and understand. They can have uneven academic skills and may appear unmotivated. They may act out and have low self-esteem. We must focus on their strengths and need more opportunities to what they know in ways that are more suited to them.

14. Recognizing Problems • Signs of Trouble • Underachievement (or Selective Consumer?) • Dropping out of high school • Low self-esteem • Depression