Gifted kids can be a joy to teach when you know how to place what engages them. These 50 tips and tricks come from my own feel and from around the Web. They're expert to take in your pocketbook of tricks whether you're a newbie or an old hand at education these loftier-level thinkers.

1. Know Their Interests

Every year, I start by having my students consummate an interest inventory. This helps me ensure that curriculum is personalized to their interests.

2. Endeavor Book Talks

Share what you are reading with gifted students. Frequently, these students experience a reading lag where they tin can't notice a sweetness spot because information technology is hard for high-ability students to sympathize what is both challenging and appropriate.

3. Go along Them Agile

Gifted students often need to accept the ability to move when learning … pacing, flapping and bouncing are parts of their thinking process.

iv. Offer Flexible Seating

A window seat is my favorite identify to read, so I keep that in mind when offering seating. Try to offer unlike seating options for students: beanbag chairs, carpet squares, pillows, manager chairs … the list can go on and on.

SOURCE: kindergartenisgrrreat.blogspot.com

5. Model Social Situations

Social situations can exist challenging for some gifted students as their ability to understand social cues can exist underdeveloped. Squad up with other teachers to model the proper style to outset conversations.

6. Share Current Events

Current events are important to contain into gifted programming. Nosotros want these students to be thinking about how they can use their talents to solve existent-earth bug.

vii. Look for the Helpers

Equally of import as current events are, it is besides just as important to understand that gifted students internalize global happenings on a very personal level. Kids practice not have the experience with the world to empathize that despite at that place being a war or assail, there are still skillful things happening in the world.

SOURCE: Reddit

8. Let for Groupings

Not all gifted students are meant to be the project manager. Permit students the opportunity to work alone or in a group. Even cross-grade groupings piece of work well with gifted students.

9. Listen the Child Labor Laws

Gifted students who cease early should not automatically be the teacher's helper. Gifted students can be some of the worst students to assist others because their brains often work very differently. Having a gifted child assistance a student who is struggling may do more than impairment than good.

10. Create a Makerspace

My grandmother always said, idle easily are the devil's workshop … then keep some key things in the back for busy hands. LEGO bricks, paper-thin and masking tape, and Snap Circuits are some of my favorites!

11. Introduce Minecraft Edu

Don't exist scared to contain students' passions and interests. I once had a educatee who never wanted to practise spelling words until I told him he could exercise them in Minecraft. Minecraft Edu has lots of great ways teachers can implement this engaging game in the classroom.

SOURCE: http://pedagogy.minecraft.net/

12. Requite Them End Dates

Provide gifted students with clear endpoints on projects and assignments. Gifted students tin create unusually high expectations and never encounter an end in sight; a volume reflection tin easily become a ten-page paper, a PowerPoint tin can go an intensive course on the topic. Letting students know where to stop can be helpful.

13. Set Realistic Goals

Use FutureMe.org and have students write a alphabetic character to their future selves. One time students accept written the letter, yous can fix the date for it to be sent to their inbox. What a smashing way for students to set up goals and create natural check-in points.

14. Teach Decision-Making

Gifted students can have a huge case of FOMO: fright of missing out. They understand that decisions accept consequences, and sometimes they demand to be given an inordinate corporeality of details most their options. Allow for the gifted student to fully understand the pros and cons of a decision.

15. Be Patient

Gifted students are processing a lot in their minds. Be patient and requite them the time to reflect on what they demand to come to a consensus they can alive with.

16. Assign Expiration Dates

My gifted students walk into class with exploding folders and binders. They keep everything because there is a fear of being unprepared. Merely like expiration dates for food, think about adding a footer to your handouts: "This handout expires on April 15."

17. Model Organization Strategies

Or at least model how you organize life. Gifted students similar options and seeing how they work in the "real world" is very helpful. I show students how I use notes to organize things, how Google Calendar is my lifeline, and what I practice for physical notes. I have used planners in the past and evidence those examples besides.

We besides review dissimilar apps that could be helpful. I urge students to find what works for them. No system is not an respond. We all need a system to assistance us be productive. When I taught younger students, we would all try different systems together as our cease-of-the-mean solar day procedure.

xviii. Utilise Brain Breaks

Offer gifted students a hobby that can assistance at-home their busy minds. Teach them how to Zentangle, breathe, meditate, brand friendship bracelets, knit, color—anything that allows for them to focus advisedly on details tin aid them tranquility some of the extra noise.

SOURCE: http://teachertothecore.blogspot.com

nineteen. Explore Their Passions

Some gifted students don't take a passion yet because they oasis't found it. Provide exposure to as much as possible. TED talks are one way to help students think about dissimilar topics. TED fifty-fifty has created educational activity enhancements. I middle TED.

20. Read Tons of Biographies

Reading, watching or listening to the lives of others can help gifted students develop a programme of action and see what others did to attain goals.

21. Read Lots of Everything

It is true, and so many gifted students have found a book that becomes so much a function of them, they can hash out it at length. Bibliotherapy is a great way for students to experience how to deal with issues and learn tactics and strategies.

22. Pre-Assess Them

For the love of annihilation that is holy, this should probably be no. i. Enquiry states that about gifted students practise not learn new information until January. Don't make a student who has already mastered a concept sit through the lesson once again.

23. Allow Them to Focus

Let gifted students pursue their interests. If they want to let everything be nearly dinosaurs, more power to them! Nosotros demand paleontologists. Every bit mentioned in Outliers , it takes over 10,000 hours to be an proficient. To get that many hours on a fourth dimension card, students have to be allowed to focus.

24. Make Connections

We demand to allow students to hyper-focus but also so be the "guide on the side" that helps them make connections from ane expanse to some other. Perhaps we can get our dinosaur expert to utilise Scratch and make a "Dino Dig" math game?

25. Find Mentors

Gifted students demand mentors inside their interest areas. Mentors can teach students how to navigate through professions and can even exist gatekeepers to additional opportunities.

26. Practice Like Professionals

Allow students to exercise like the professionals. Use the aforementioned processes that professionals use. Looking to effort fashion designing? Accept students actually sew, measure, use patterns and do the alterations. Visit the American Museum of Natural History'south OLogy interactive site.

27. Locate Authentic Audiences

The work students create should have a real audience and exist appreciated past those who authentically would benefit from its completion. Younger students are a great first accurate audition.

28. Put Them in Escape Rooms

If you haven't heard of these yet, drop everything and head over to http://world wide web.breakoutedu.com/digital/ . These are a cracking way to curate the knowledge y'all want your students to proceeds.

29. Sentinel Webinars

Yous tin can find webinars on just about any topic that interests your students. If yous sign upward at Edtech , they will ship weekly lists of upcoming professional webinars.

30. Submit Inventions

Inventions are a great way for students to accept risks and try unlike things. I feel like students are more than apt to accept risks when they are creating something new. Student Inventions for a Ameliorate America challenges students to submit an invention that will make the world a improve identify … and there are winners every month.

31. Try Gamification

I beloved The Mind Research Institute, which challenges students in grades K–12 to design their ain mathematical game.

32. Check Out Local Happenings

Do y'all live in the middle of nowhere? Me too! Simply I was surprised to learn there were still a TON of events happening on the weekends. If you are in the urban areas, you are rich in opportunities. Await to local libraries, museums or universities.

33. Send Them to Summer Camp

Some of my closest babyhood friendships started at summer camp. These times allowed for encouragement and allowed kids to be nurtured in an environment where trying something new was the goal. Summer campsite immune me to exist myself and try new things.

34. Solve Local Problems

"With great power comes great responsibleness," says one of our favorite superheroes, and he is correct—kindness counts. We need to do adept with the gifts and talents nosotros have been given. Give gifted students the opportunity to solve local problems and run into the need for change in their own community. Allow a book to inspire this mission: Wonder , Kindness Gild , or The Summer I Changed the World in 65 Days.

35. Develop Book Clubs

What practise friends all have in common? Interests!! We are attracted to those who call back similarly and those who challenge our behavior. Book clubs brand for a great infinite for likeminded students to come together to discuss a common theme … in this case a book, which serves as a smashing discussion starter.

36. Allow for Voice and Option

How many of you hated a sure book in loftier school only to read it equally an developed and encounter how incorrect you were? The moment we lost pick (of what to read in this case), nosotros also lost joy. Allowing gifted students to have choice in the classroom allows them to feel empowered and engaged. Choices do non need to be huge either, small-scale choices are just every bit important.

37. Enhance the Bar

No i wants to simply exist the big fish in a small-scale pond. We want to be around people who volition make us better and desire to achieve more than. Allow your gifted student to be challenged by participating in bookish competitions such as National History Day. Your students will see what truthful competition is.

38. Brainstorm

This is one of the best ways to develop critical thinking. Bear witness a motion-picture show of clouds … what do you see? This type of activity develops fluency, elabora tion, originality and abstract thinking, which are all integral parts of being a artistic thinker. Try Google's Quick, Draw!  It'southward a great tool for getting students to think quickly—it's as well a gem for indoor recess.

39. Model Marvel

When the students ask a question you don't know, look information technology upwards with them. As librarian media specialist Melissa Thom says, "the smartest people are the people who know how to observe answers to their own questions." Follow her on twitter at@msthombookitis.

40. Effort Flocabulary

Flocabulary creates content-rich raps (yes, as in hip-hop) about merely about Annihilation. There are and then many wonderful resources embedded within—contests, lyric labs, lyric notes, connections to primary sources, teacher plans, corresponding handouts, questioning and so much more! This will rapidly get your favorite teaching resource. I promise!

41. Let Them Read Below-Level Books

Why do we expect every book gifted students read to be one.5–two grade levels above their reading level? I say, if a student is enjoying a book, read information technology! Yeah, challenging books are needed to develop reading ability but don't discount a book only because it is below a student's level. Reading a book for a unlike purpose can increase the difficulty of a book without changing the text.

42. Connect Globally

Global Read Aloud is a program where i volume is used to connect the globe. Pernille Ripp founded GRA in 2010 with the uncomplicated idea to read a book aloud to her stude nts and during that time endeavour to make as many global connections equally possible. This mission has grown exponentially and has reached over two million students. Collaborating with students in other states and countries will help a gifted student think empathetically.

43. Incorporate Mythology

If you know a gifted s tudent, then you know that mythology tin can be a huge interest—often spurred by the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan. Permit students to build a better understanding by incorporating mythology into different curricular units.

44. Blog

This is an authentic way for gifted students to share their reading in a way that we would as adults. Creating readers ways treating them like readers—when I end a volume I do not take a comprehension quiz. I talk most information technology, share information technology with friends or write about it. Have your students react to reading like real readers. Kidblog is a great tool for creating safe student blogs.

45. Crowdsource

Two heads are better than one! Allow students to go places where they can interact. Google Docs is a groovy place to start, but too explore tools like FlipGrid , a tool that allows students to tape and reply to one another.

46. Be a Safe Space

Provide a safe space for gifted students to take risks without being put downwardly. Gifted students are often timid to answer something they are unsure nearly because of the social stigma attached to not answering correctly. Create a classroom civilisation where wrong answers get an opportunity to gloat different thinking. Check out Nancy Anderson's book, What'due south Correct About Wrong Answers? Learning Math From Mistakes.

47. Use QR Codes

QR codes add an interactive component to your classroom. Create a QR Lawmaking Museum or Gallery or even a QR scavenger hunt on one of your classroom bulletin boards.

48. Write Haikus

A frog jumps into the swimming, splash! Silence once again. This is Basho Matsuo's famous haiku. Utilize haiku as a mode to challenge gifted students to summarize chapters, electric current events, biographies or vocabulary words. Haiku are student-friendly still forcefulness them to be curtailed and purposeful with their word pick.

49. Change the World

Action is powerful for gifted students. Allowing students to observe solutions to problems they meet in their school, neighborhood or community will allow them to sympathize that they can make a difference. Internalizing that they can exist the change in the earth is transformational. Watch these TED Talks to show them what kids like them are doing to change the earth.

50. Record Them

Allow gifted students to record their voices into an app or flick awarding. Educational activity in front of peers is public speaking and that is its ain animate being. By assuasive gifted students to evidence their work in a style that allows their confidence to be present is a win-win. Explicate Everything is a collaborative and interactive whiteboard tool that makes this approach a slice of cake!