4 characteristics of a gifted child - is your child gifted? Take this easy quiz

Let's celebrate and enhance our children's gifts, whatever they are.

        Perhaps you are wondering if your child is gifted. Several questions arise when parents realize they may have a gifted child. What exactly is a gifted child? Where can you get your child tested and assessed? Can a child be molded into a genius? How does one maintain the balance between encouragement and pressure? Is it possible to raise a gifted child with his happiness still intact? What is the best way to raise gifted children? What if you don’t do anything? (The end of Vol. 7 of It's Not Rocket Surgery! has several useful, hands-on ideas for parents to try.)

        “Every gift contains a danger. Whatever gift we have, we are compelled to express. And if the expression of that gift is blocked, distorted, or merely allowed to languish, then the gift turns against us, and we suffer.” Johnson (1993), as quoted by Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., Director, Gifted Development Center, of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, http://www.gifteddevelopment.com.

        Gifted children usually have an intense need for a creative outlet. When a child is gifted, but his/her own school or family doesn't recognize or appreciate it, those talents are often subdued or snuffed out by that environment. This can cause behavioral problems both at home and at school.

        Rita Dickinson, founder of gifted education in Colorado, realized that at least half of the parents referred to her had no idea their children were gifted. When the parents didn't recognize it, the school didn't either. (In many cases, the mothers may have thought their child was gifted, but the fathers talked them out of it.)

        The gifted children most often overlooked were from low socio-economic backgrounds, ethnically diverse, or both. Dickinson also stated that a large percentage of the gifted children she tested in the Denver Public Schools were first referred for behavior problems.

        Public school programs for gifted children give economically-disadvantaged children the only opportunities they may have to develop their abilities. Those who want to eliminate gifted classes are punishing the gifted poor, because the rich can afford private schooling. Many middle class families choose to home-school their children rather than to subject them, day in and day out, to the constant boredom of what they already know.

        Having been a gifted child myself, and having several gifted children of my own, has given me plenty of insight into the dos and don'ts of parenting intelligent youngsters. Whether some children are gifted- and others are not- can depend upon our definition (more later). What makes some children gifted is the ability to memorize things easily. What makes other children gifted is the ability to see patterns and relationships. Others easily see geometric relationships in three dimensions. Even others have the ability to readily understand language structure. Sometimes we view giftedness as having a strong talent for music or art. Maybe some are savants in a specialized area.

        Too often we think of gifted as doing well in school and getting top grades. But there is also the ability to be intelligent in understanding human relationships, behavior motivators, and body language. Sometimes our definitions are too narrow. Genius children can seem attention-deficit or hyperactive due to boredom and a need for constant data input for their brain. They are misdiagnosed ADHD when all they need is more interesting mental stimulation!

        Being gifted is a combination of genetics (nature), environment (nurture), and attitude (the child's own viewpoint and choices). I have one son with a t-shirt that reads, "Genius by birth, slacker by choice," which is so true for him! Attitude - inner motivation - is everything. I have a daughter who gets top grades, but she has to put a lot of work, time, effort, and study into it. She has made herself gifted or talented, in a sense.

        If a child is genetically gifted, her parents can enhance her abilities or destroy her self-esteem by how they handle the situation. Parents can encourage a child's natural abilities or they can ruin them with too much force. Is being academically smart the only area of the child worth developing? What about heart? What about compassion? Social awareness? Gratitude? Humility? A child's love of learning can grow or wither depending on parents' choices.

        Is your child gifted? Take this easy quiz.

• Does your child learn at a much faster pace?
• Does your child process material to a much greater depth?
• Does your child show intensity in energy, imagination, intellectual prowess, sensitivity, and emotion, which are not typical in the general population?
• Does your child create something, somehow, some way, whether academic, scientific, literary, musical, or artistic?

        This info comes from the ERIC Clearinghouse on Handicapped and Gifted Children (1985), http://www.ri.net/gifted_talented/character.html, cites three types of characteristics of gifted children: general behavioral, learning, and creative characteristics. Parents of gifted children will get a kick reading through the following definitions and recognizing them in their children. (No, they don't have to have all of these to be gifted.)

General Behavioral Characteristics

1. Does/did your child learn to read early, with better comprehension of the nuances of language? As much as half the gifted and talented population has learned to read before entering school.
2. (Did the gift increase the reading, or did the reading increase the gift, or both?)
3. Does your child read widely, quickly, and intensely and have large vocabularies?
4. Does your child commonly learn basic skills better, more quickly, and with less practice? 
5. Is your child better able to construct and handle abstractions?
6. Does your child often pick up and interpret nonverbal cues and can draw inferences that other children need to have spelled out for them?
7. Does your child take less for granted, seeking the "hows" and "whys"? 
8. Does your child work independently at an earlier age and can concentrate for longer periods? 
9. Does your child have interests that are both wildly eclectic and intensely focused?
10. Does your child often have seemingly boundless energy (which sometimes leads to a misdiagnosis of hyperactivity)?
11. Does your child usually respond and relate well to parents, teachers, and other adults? (They may prefer the company of older children and adults to that of their peers.)
12. Does your child like to learn new things, is willing to examine the unusual, and is highly inquisitive?
13. Does your child tackle tasks and problems in a well-organized, goal-directed, and efficient manner?
14. Does your child exhibit an intrinsic motivation to learn, find out, or explore and is often very persistent? ("I'd rather do it myself" is a common attitude.) 

Learning Characteristics 

1. Is your child a natural learner? 
2. Does your child show keen powers of observation and a sense of the significant? (They have an eye for important details.)
3. Does your child read a great deal on his/her own, preferring books and magazines written for children older than s/he is?
4. Does your child often take great pleasure in intellectual activity?
5. Does your child have well-developed powers of abstraction, conceptualization, and synthesis?
6. Does your child readily see cause-effect relationships?
7. Does your child often display a questioning attitude and seek information for its own sake as much as for its usefulness?
8. Is your child often skeptical, critical, and evaluative? (They are quick to spot inconsistencies.)
9. Does your child have a large storehouse of information about a variety of topics, which they can recall quickly?
10. Does your child readily grasp underlying principles and can often make valid generalizations about events, people, or objects?
11. Does your child quickly perceive similarities, differences, and anomalies?
12. Does your child often attack complicated material by separating it into components and analyzing it systematically?

Creative Characteristics 

1. Does your child's creative abilities often set him/her apart from age-mates?
2. Is your child a fluent thinker, able to generate possibilities, consequences, or related ideas?
3. Is your child a flexible thinker, able to use many different alternatives and approaches to problem solving?
4. Is your child an original thinker, seeking new, unusual, or unconventional associations and combinations among items of information?
5. Does your child see relationships among seemingly unrelated objects, ideas, or facts?
6. Is your child an elaborate thinker, producing new steps, ideas, responses, or other embellishments to a basic idea, situation, or problems?
7. Is your child willing to entertain complexity and seem to thrive on problem solving?
8. Is your child a good guesser and can readily construct hypotheses or "what if" questions?
9. Is your child often aware of his/her own impulsiveness and irrationality, and show emotional sensitivity?
10. Is your child extremely curious about objects, ideas, situations, or events?
11. Does your child often display intellectual playfulness and like to fantasize and imagine?
12. Is your child less intellectually inhibited than their peers are in expressing opinions and ideas, and they often disagree spiritedly with others' statements?
13. Does your child sensitive to beauty and are attracted to aesthetic values?
14. Does your child often have a drive to be creative- to create something new all the time?

        In general, a child with an IQ of 100+ is average, of 130+ is gifted, of 150+ is highly-gifted/genius, and of 170+ is profoundly-gifted/genius. The child of 160+ IQ is as different from the child of 130+ IQ as that child is different from the child of average ability. Recent research indicates that there may be many more children in this high range than formerly believed. Due to their unique characteristics, these children are particularly vulnerable to being misunderstood. Highly-gifted children still need specialized advocates because very few appropriate curriculums and non-traditional options have been developed for these children to date. (Common Core should be abolished.)

        Highly-gifted children tend to reveal disproportionate development, meaning that their mental age increases at a much faster rate than their physical and emotional growth. Because of their high cognitive abilities and high emotional intensities, they experience and relate to the world in unique ways. These children are often found as a result of extremely high scores on individually-scored IQ tests, generally above the 140 IQ range. Others may be prodigies or savants in specific areas such as math, science, language and/or the arts. As noted previously, profoundly-gifted children can score in excess of 170 IQ.

        A bright child who is capable of scoring in the high ninety percentiles on group achievement testing may not be considered gifted. We must recognize that standard achievement tests are "grade level testing".  Such a child is definitely academically-talented, but further individualized IQ and out-of-level academic testing must be given before we can define that child as "gifted". [Much of this comes from Linda Kreger Silverman (ibid).]

        May all parents of gifted and talented children recognize those gifts, help the schools recognize them, and do their utmost to enhance and develop their children’s talents. All parents would be wise to teach their children math and reading early (ages birth to 5), and to teach them in the right way – direct instruction and phonics.

http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/StarLightStarBright4characteristicsofagiftedchildIsyourchildgiftedTakethiseasyquiz

Why moms recognize, support, and celebrate gifted children sooner

                In general, did you know that women usually recognize giftedness in their children long before men do? Women recognize early cognitive development in their children while men are waiting for some kind of outward achievement to prove giftedness.

                Male researchers seem to focus on outward proof too, while female researchers see the giftedness in the precocious developmental stages first. They realize that a person can be gifted in one or more areas without actually producing anything at all. The giftedness is in the way children think, not just what they do. Thank goodness my Dad didn’t make that mistake- and worked with me early.

                Even in our modern world, boys are far more likely to be brought for gifted-testing than girls. At the Denver Gifted Development Center, 60% of the 5,200 children tested to date are male and 40% are female. Boys are more likely than girls to misbehave when they are inadequately challenged (bored) at school. Because of this, they are more likely to get their parents’ attention and involvement.

                 It is crucial for gifted girls to be recognized early, before they go into hiding in the middle school years. (Many women don’t realize they are gifted and think their children get it from their father.) More about gifted teen girls in future blogs.

                When we define giftedness by achievement in school, or with the potential for significant achievement in adulthood, we create an unequal measure for children of diversity, children who are economically underprivileged, and for girls. Throughout history, those who attained distinction have been primarily white, middle or upper class males.

                However, giftedness is blind to color, is dispersed across all socio-economic levels, and is found in equal amounts in males and females. While the percentage of gifted students among the upper classes may be higher (showing that gifted children are not just born, but also made), the great majority of gifted children come from the lower classes. All over the world, there are many more poor gifted-children than rich ones.

                For a lot of gifted children who weren’t born with a silver spoon, education means public school. What can parents do to improve their bright child’s educational experience? One concerned mother wrote to me in 2009:

                “I believe my son is gifted. We live in ____, MO. Needless to say, I am unimpressed with the school’s expectations for students. My son is entering 2nd grade next week. He was so bored in class and I do not look forward to this year, either.

                On the school supply list for his class, they are requesting flash cards for addition and subtraction of numbers 0-10. My son knew how to add and subtract these numbers before he was in kindergarten. I feel his reading skills are above grade level as well.

                Can you please help me with some sort of resource-a glimmer of hope, perhaps that my child will not be bored to tears this year? I really do not know what to do. Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.”

                I give several resources through this Vol. 7 of It's Not Rocket Surgery!, as well as in future blogs. Parents should talk to their child’s teacher and see if s/he is willing to allow the child to work ahead when bored. They should also see if the teacher will allow the child to read books when finished with assignments early.

                Too often, bright children are labeled ADHD and medicated for the teacher’s convenience when really they’re just bored. They need healthy alternatives for their active minds, and shouldn’t be held back to the standards of the slower kids in the class.

                Whether school means public, private, or home, the purposeful proactive parents will find ways to optimize their child’s educational experience. They will make the time – a priority – in their busy schedules, because this is the stuff that really counts in life.

http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/StarLightStarBrightrecognizingsupportingandcelebratingthegiftedchild 

3 reasons why sight-words damage a child's reading ability

What about reading fluency? What about "experts" who say that children need sight words as well as phonics to achieve fluency and confidence?  They are mistaken. The only sight words that children should practice with flash cards are the ones that they have already sounded out with phonics. The flash cards would just help them speed up reading time after they already know the WHY of the words. Using sight-words without knowing the why is like using a calculator when you have no idea what adding or subtracting really means. You may get a right answer most of the time at first, but as your learning becomes more complex, you really trip yourself up without knowing the WHY.

        In the article (on www.donpotter.net), Miscue Analysis: Training Normal Children to Read Like Defective Children, Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld observes,

        “Back in the early 1900s, when the professors of education were working overtime to find “scientific” justification for changing reading instruction in American schools from alphabetic phonics to the look-say, sight, or whole-word method, many studies were done to see what kind of effect the new method would have on children’s reading ability.

        “One study done by Myrtle Sholty, published in the February 1912 issue of the Elementary School Teacher, revealed that the two methods of teaching reading produced two different kinds of readers: objective and subjective. The alphabetic-phonics method produced fluent, accurate, objective readers while the sight method produced impaired subjective readers who guessed at words, omitted words, inserted words, substituted words, and mutilated words. The sight readers’ lack of phonetic knowledge put them at a distinct disadvantage. They were unable to accurately decode the words since they looked at them as whole configurations, like Chinese ideographs, with no connections to the sounds of the language.

        And so it was well known by the top psychologists involved in creating the new look-say or sight reading programs that these whole-word instruction methods produced inaccurate subjective readers. Despite this, the professors proceeded to devise and publish the textbooks based on this very defective methodology.”

        In the November 1914 issue of Elementary School Teacher, Clara Schmitt observed,

        “The child who learns words in this way [sight] only is always dependent upon his teacher since he can acquire for himself no new or unfamiliar word from the printed page… [The errors made] were calculated to fill in the context. The defective child reads, for instance that the fox saw a vine with berries (instead of grapes) on it.

        “The normal child progresses in his knowledge of phonetic values to such an extent that he becomes independent of the teacher in so far as the illogical complexities of our English spelling permit. At the fourth grade the normal child is able to work out new and unfamiliar words with approximate phonetic correctness.”

        In other words, it was easier for the defective [non-phonetic, sight-reader] child to substitute a word which fitted the context than to decode the word accurately. And that is the way many children are being taught to read today, in the 21st century!

        Whole-language guru, Frank Smith, mistakenly wrote in Reading Without Nonsense [what an ironic title],

        “Children do not need a mastery of phonics in order to identify words that they have not met in print before.... Once a child discovers what a word is in a meaningful context, learning to recognize it on another occasion is as simple as learning to recognize a face on a second occasion, and does not need phonics. Discovering what a word is in the first place is usually most efficiently accomplished by asking someone, listening to someone else read the word, or using context to provide a substantial clue.”

        The difference between Clara Schmitt and Frank Smith is that Schmitt came to her conclusions after observing real children in a real classroom, whereas Smith writes from theory alone. All that glitters is not golden. What is clear is that the two teaching methods – phonics and whole word – turn out two different kinds of readers. Phonics methodology produces accurate, objective readers. The whole-word approach produces error-filled, subjective readers.

        Why is the U.S. educational system continuing to decline, regardless of how much money we funnel into it?

        In summary, the repercussions of over four decades of the whole-language fiasco, et al, are still being felt in our public schools. The school system won’t turn around until the universities change what they teach the teachers to teach. We experimented with 22 teaching models on U.S. children from 1967 to 1995. Only one of those worked. The other 21 models were abject failures, such as whole-language, yet proponents were able to get them legislated into most state curricula. Many are still being used today.

        This is why it is up to parents to give their children a sure foundation of reading at home before they start kindergarten. Only parents can turn the downward educational trend for their children. Waiting for schools and legislators to change will only waste your child’s quickly-passing window of opportunity to succeed.

A couple of FAQ:

        What are the author’s credentials? (education, research, and experience)

        Shannah B Godfrey was a gifted child herself because her dad took the time to teach her to read by phonics when she was only 3 years old. Her successful school career led her to a successful college career and then to a successful aerospace career. She is also the parent of many children – adopted, step, and natural (14, not counting the foster children) – and understands how to prepare, nourish, and stimulate young minds, to open up the world of possibilities to them.

        Was Shannah B Godfrey really a rocket scientist? (most-searched Google question about TGM)

        Yes. She worked as a Research & Development (R&D) Chemist on Solid Rocket Motors (SRM) for almost ten years at Alliant Techsystems (formerly Thiokol Corp). She co-developed several cutting-edge technologies that were presented to the Joint Army Navy NASA Air Force (JANNAF) Conference in 2007.

The Author, Shannah B Godfrey, with her aerospace science and engineering group (expecting her 14th child)

http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/BeingaWiseOwl3reasonswhysightwordsdamageachildsreadingability

5 reasons why a good vocabulary needs phonics

Did you know that phonics help a child to increase and understand more vocabulary?

        Learning to read by phonics and the phonics spelling rules gives a child such a rich vocabulary and understanding of words, root words, usage, comprehension of words and sentences, better pronunciation, and best of all - confidence. No other reading method is this robust. In fact, sight-reading causes problems, dyslexia, and embarrassment.

        Learning a word by sight does not help a child recognize it when its usage and prefix or suffix changes. The child must memorize a whole new word (word-shape) for each alternative. This is cumbersome and ridiculous. Adults who sight-read say a lot of Archie-Bunkerisms; hilarious but embarrassing.

        And for words that don't follow the rules, first learning a "platypus" word phonetically helps a child remember it much easier than sight-reading because she has made common associations in her mind that are much more useful than guessing from the first letter of the word, its length and/or context (so cumbersome and confusing).

        As mentioned in previous volumes of It's Not Rocket Surgery!, a sight-reader needs to memorize about 4,000 word-shapes to have a basic reading vocabulary; it’s easy to mix up similar words. Whereas a phonetic-reader only needs to memorize about 47 sounds to read, and easily increases his/her vocabulary regularly.

        Mistakes are going to be made by early readers. But there is a big difference between a phonics mistake that is easily correctable and a lifetime of basic illiteracy beyond the limited sight-word vocabulary. As shown in VAS in previous chapters, we have seen otherwise intelligent college students that couldn’t write down a simple phone message properly- thanks to Whole Language.

http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/BeingaWiseOwl5reasonswhyagoodvocabularyneedsphonics