Signs That Show Your Schooler Is Intellectually Gifted

What are your school problems with the child? She finds school tasks too simple? She reads better and faster than her classmates? You begin to suspect she is intellectually gifted. How to make sure she is and what to do about it?

First, mind that there are kids who manifest their superlative intellectual gift very early on, while others discover they are well-endowed with brains only after they have done a spell at school. They require different approaches.

How to detect a gifted child at ages 50 to 8

The kid is on the way to be recognized as gifted if they:

• are prone to abstract thinking, can understand complex ideas, include ethic, religious, moral considerations in their conversation;
• show specific giftedness, like being able to calculate numbers in the head, understand concepts before learning them at school;
• can concentrate on what she is doing for a long while;
• boasts a vocabulary noticeably larger than her friends and schoolmates;
• shows good school performance does works that are way better than her peers’;
• has a retentive memory and can refer to facts related to the topic;
• feels confident about her plans and activities;
• is frequently creative, thinks up stories, sings her own tunes, draws well;
• displays leadership qualities and can organize her peers for games or other group activities;
• understands jokes and witty sayings;
• likes to keep company with adults and children older than herself;
• reacts to the feelings of others.

Now as for schoolchildren, how they express their abilities

Your child is clever, she likes school and the intellectual challenge it offers, so there are no worries either way. But once you get continuous complaints to the effect that it is dull because it is very easy, maybe it’s time you looked into the matter.

You can try testing; it isn’t the best method of assessing your kid’s worth, but it may reveal some interesting information. If you get impressive results, you can talk to the school’s administration and teachers and arrange with them a special teaching environment for the child. You contact the relevant person on the school staff and have your kid tested. By information from the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC), they provide good quality testing.

Should the school not be forthcoming, you can find a child psychologist who will run a test for special abilities. An independent expert working outside school could do it more quickly and step in as the child’s advocate. This kind of testing can run to a large sum, but there are insurance plans that cover the expenses.

As for the famous IQ tests. They do not always work well enough with very young children and should really be attempted since age four and a half. Before that, the test can show different results if taken the second time. The average score is generally ranged between 90 and 110, and a gifted child is supposed to show 130 and more. But nowadays this decision is made not by IQ alone – other factors are also considered. Some of them are subjective, like a written impression of the child in question by teachers and other concerned adults.

If you are intent on clearly defining the kid’s abilities and ensure her getting opportunities to go on learning at a higher level, it can be done by proper evaluation.

But sometimes giftedness is not so obvious and doesn‘t yield itself easily to detection.

It often occurs when a child combines talents and disability. While the disability is seen and addressed, talent remains overshadowed and passes unnoticed.

Factors making giftedness less obvious are belonging to ethnic minorities, having a native language other than English, and coming from unhealthy backgrounds.

If you believe that your child needs special attention to let her reveal her talents and abilities, consult a psychologist who is aware of these issues, talk to the teacher and ask them to watch over the child and try and evaluate the level of her academic power.