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Books for Parents and Educators

As most people who know a gifted child can attest, giftedness is not simply being smarter, although that certainly is a fundamental characteristic. Rather, gifted children are different from other children in almost everything they do and feel. They tend to be unusually intense, focused, and driven to learn. They become bored easily and turn off their brains entirely during the repetition of facts. They may daydream or make up ways to make what they’re learning more interesting. And they are typically extremely sensitive, leaving adults wondering what could possibly be worth such reactions. Parenting books, education courses, and the advice of other adults often are frustratingly unhelpful.

We offer books that are specifically designed to help parents and teachers of gifted children understand these children better so that they can meet the children where they are, instead of holding them to expectations that they will never be able to meet. Just as we believe that children will thrive if they are given as much knowledge as they are willing to soak up, adults too will do well to learn as much as they can about these children. The old adage that knowledge is power is true, and together gifted kids and the adults who nurture, support, and teach them can create a powerful partnership to help launch the children into healthy, happy young adults who are ready to take on the world.

Books for Both Parents and Teachers

Books for Parents and Other Caregivers

Books for Teachers and Other Educators

Michael Clay Thompson said of gifted children’s educational needs:

“Gifted children are those who require a differentiated educational program if their exceptional needs are to be met. Their ability is not just a socially undesirable characteristic, an unfair advantage that they have over other children; it is often a disadvantage; it often creates serious problems. Gifted children won’t ‘get everything on their own’; they need us to understand them, support them, and provide differentiated instruction for them, just as other children with exceptional learning characteristics need our specific understanding and support. 

“Differentiation is the critical fact; gifted children are at risk; they need us to provide them with an education that is appropriate in rigorous, accelerated content and advanced thinking processes…. They need instruction that responds to their extra curiosity, to their urgency for meaning, to their advanced vocabularies, to their interest in complexity, to their fast comprehensions, to their vast memories. Gifted children need choice—individualized and self-regulating experiences that are appropriate to their self-motivated independence. They need higher-order thinking activities that give their abstract minds a workout. They need Socratic questioning. They need advanced levels of subject matter, because they can learn them, and short instructions, because they will understand them immediately, and quick paces through difficult material, because they don’t need many things repeated.

We also have a variety of articles by different authors and experts on the topic of giftedness on our News & Events page.

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