Education for Gifted Students

Gifted students are often well beyond their years when it comes to their ability, however they are not always mature enough to handle the assignments that go along with that ability. This brings about a problem of accommodating these students with sufficient enrichment or acceleration without using subjects that are too mature for their mental age. Gifted students can learn the same standards, themes, units and concepts as the rest of the class. They will just be allowed regular opportunities to become engaged with learning activities that require more depth and complexity. One way to accommodate a gifted learner in a chronological age-based assignment organization is through the use of extension activities that will provide more challenge. Extension activities can be created and used in a variety of ways. Curriculum Differentiation Charts can be made to address the different learning styles of the students while addressing the key concepts of the unit or theme being studied. Extension Menus can be made that offer different activities through the different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Thinking. Students can also be provided with the opportunity to create a learning center. This would involve giving the students some parameters and guidelines for how to create the center and what needs to be included. When grading these activities and assignments it would be helpful to create a rubric that would be shown to the students before they begin the assignment so that they understand the criteria for which they are being assessed.
Enabling a gifted student to learn and progress through the curriculum at an appropriate pace for them can be difficult at times. It involves criteria that consists of pretesting the students on units and deciding whether or not they can move on through the curriculum at an accelerating pace or possibly have the material for the year compacted so that they can learn what they need to learn in a given unit without having to sit through classes