Do you struggle to support the needs of gifted children in your classroom? Teachers often find it difficult to understand the specific needs of gifted students, which means they often don't get the support they need in the classroom. Find out how you can better support the gifted students in your classroom below!
1. Learn how gifted students think.
If you want to support gifted students in your classroom, it's important that you make an effort to learn how they think and learn about the different struggles they face. Understanding that gifted students have special needs, requirements, and trends in behavior will help you meet their needs and better support them in the classroom.
2. Created tiered assignments for students.
Tiered assignments can help you meet the needs of all students. Choose the basic standard objective and design an assignment on that standard to make the middle tier. Once the middle tier is finished, you make the other tiers by adding support for at-risk children and adding challenge for gifted students. Here are two simple ways you can add challenge to assignments:
- Give gifted students more complex numbers in a math assignment or a more difficult text to read.
- Add a second component to assignments, such as having them apply the skill they've learned to a real-world situation or asking them to write an explanation of their thinking.
3. Include a variety of levels in your classroom library.
Make sure your classroom library has a variety of texts to support the reading ability and interests of gifted students. You can also encourage students to bring reading materials from home, but make sure the materials they bring challenge them to learn new words and increase their reading skills.
4. Utilize their talents and interests.
Gifted students are often asked to do busy work when they finish assignments ahead of others. Instead of taking that approach, try utilizing gifted students' talents and interests to further explore a skill. For example, students could write or draw something related to the assignment/skill or they could act out solutions to the problem or project.
5. Explore real-word application.
Gifted students understand math algorithms, science concepts, and grammar rules very quickly. You can encourage them to move beyond the skill they're learning by applying it in the real world. For example, they can explore how area and perimeter affect an architect's design or how scientists use animal classification to understand animal life and how it functions.
Create a differentiation strategy for your classroom with the educational materials and resources available in our Elementary section.
