Tips for Supporting Gifted Children

1. Develop a bibliography of books for you as a family to read. Use Halsted’s Some of my Best Friends Are Books as a starting list. Use the Syntopticon or Adult Great Books programs for reading when the child is older.

2. Arrange for your child to have chances to be with “true peers” on a regular basis or with older children for strategy situations, such as orienteering, chess, games, or simulations.

3. Help your child develop verbal responses to be used in negative situations with age peers. Your child may understand why people, including siblings, act “strangely,” but they may need help with the solutions for these problems.

4. Help your child to be involved in service groups such as Scouts or in service projects in your community, religious organizations, and school, so that a sense of social responsibility and caring about others will be reinforced.

5. Provide a wide variety of exploratory activities to develop hidden interests, but then allow your child to dig deeply when an interest is found. Well roundedness isn’t always necessary for maximum personal development.

6. Help your child practice memory skills at home with memory projects, such as memorizing poems, literary passages, lists of information, visual information, and music. Teach mnemonic devices to aid memory.

This information was taken from Dr. Karen Rogers’s book Re-Forming Gifted Education.