Activities For Gifted Children

The key to motivating gifted children is to provide them with activities that test their talents. We give you some keys and examples that can help you in this difficult but rewarding task.

Many teachers include activities for gifted children in their daily routine , since sometimes conventional exercises are not sufficiently motivating for these students. It is at that moment where the teacher’s imagination is revealed to exploit its potentialities.

Nowadays, it is common to hear the term “gifted child” in school meetings, but, despite the fact that it is becoming more and more common,  finding the right way to educate them  continues to present itself as a real challenge. It is essential to remember that, regardless of whether they are gifted or not, they are infants just like their peers and therefore demand a treatment based on respect and understanding.

If these children are offered activities appropriate to their abilities, they will be stimulated to face small but attractive challenges on a daily basis, and the good results they obtain will be enough motivation to make brilliant academic progress.

Children with high abilities

A gifted or gifted child is understood to be an infant who stands out academically, socially or emotionally. In this sense, you can highlight in all fields or only in one of them. Echoing Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Theory, we can understand that an individual develops an intelligence above the average, but shows normal development in others. These are known by the name of talented children.

In addition, they tend to have an IQ much higher than 130, which can mean excellence in skills that excel when properly stimulated. Otherwise, frustration or lack of self-esteem can cause the student to go unnoticed when it comes to excellent academic results.

To detect a child with high capacities, it is necessary to take into account those signs or characteristics that define them, among which are:

• He can achieve higher achievements than boys his age.
• They have precocious talent, such as: they detect unnoticed details, memorize and learn easily, show sensitivity to certain topics or ask many questions.
• They are motivated by great intellectual challenges.
• They tend to get bored in class.
• They get along well with older boys.

Although it cannot be generalized, gifted students may present with social and emotional problems. Presenting above-average development in some fields, they may feel misunderstood or even frustrated, especially with students in the same age group. This can lead to a rejection by both parties. For this reason, they are sometimes  more comfortable with older students,  with whom they are a better fit at the maturity level.

By making use of activities appropriate for gifted children, teachers can easily turn a conventional class into extraordinary. A goal that is set, from a more creative and complex perspective, will help these children to discover their abilities as a result of good school planning.

Activities for children with high abilities

It is therefore convenient to find and promote appropriate activities to stimulate these outstanding individuals at an educational, social, emotional and cultural level. In many cases it is essential that the boys participate in the selection of the activities or tasks that are proposed to them so that there is a higher percentage of acceptance.

In general, gifted students get bored when they do repetitive and monotonous activities, hence the importance of proposing activities that involve abstract or divergent thinking, search for results and solutions or research work. Proposals in this sense must always be novel, creative, original, entertaining and involve a constant challenge to overcome. Some of them can be:

• Propose complementary activities within the school hours of deepening that have to do with the contents studied by the rest of their classmates.
• Encourage them through knowledge enrichment workshops related to new technologies, such as computer science, robotics or advanced sciences, which allow them to increase the content of their classes through research and exploration.

• Use the sense of humor, through the proposition of riddles or riddles, to favor and improve the mood and thus contribute to increase their motivation.
• Use logic games and tools, riddles or hieroglyphics.
• Encourage him to attend extracurricular classes in theater, dance, performing arts or a musical instrument, as well as to participate in a sport that catches his attention, if possible as a team.

If we want to find activities for gifted children, we must always start from their opinions and interests, and make sure that these satisfy their demanding intellectual needs. We will know that we have found the ideal when we witness demonstrations of pride in the achievements obtained.