Kreft: Literacy
Children need the opportunity to use language imaginatively-through reading, listening, discussing, writing, acting, and speaking-and to share the products of their creative efforts. Beyond this, gifted children need to know the purpose of their talents. Gifted children will likely love the freedom to stretch beyond traditional skill learning to activities that invite imaginative thought and expression.--Teaching Gifted Children in Today's Preschool and Primary Classrooms
Anchoring activity (defined by Carol Ann Tomlinson as, “meaningful work done individually and silently”) especially when children first begin a class or when they finish assigned work
Characteristics of Young Gifted Readers:
Vosslamber (2002) defines a young gifted reader as “one who displays the three aspects of giftedness that Renzulli proposes (above-average ability, task commitment, and creativity) in the area of reading” (p. 14). Renzulli (1998) argues that gifted students have three characteristics that interact to create giftedness:
Above average ability includes general abilities and specific abilities. General abilities include those skills that can be measured by standardized or IQ tests, such as word comprehension, word fluency, and verbal reasoning. Specific abilities are specialized skills best measured by performance-based assessments, such as making up stories, illustrating stories, and finding connections between stories with similar themes.
Task commitment includes self-confidence, hard work, and an ability to recognize one’s own special talents and skills and the practical use of those skills. Early readers who demonstrate task commitment will realize that they are able to read texts that are more difficult than those being read by their classmates and will show an interest in further developing these skills by expressing their areas of reading interests and projects that they would like to develop.
Creativity is originality in thinking. Early readers will likely have very different and more advanced interpretations of readings than their classmates. They may see novel connections between similarly themed texts and/or may offer interesting explanations for an author’s choice of setting, character, plot, and so on. According to Mills and Jackson (1990), young gifted readers require less drilling than their classmates, have longer attention spans, and are able to retain larger quantities of information. These children also have extraordinary discrimination and generalization abilities and are known to use more effective reading strategies than average readers (Bond & Bond, 1983). Schnur and Lowrey (1986) report that young gifted readers use phrases and entire sentences at an early age that accurately incorporate advanced vocabulary words. They are also able to use context and picture cues more successfully than their peers to aid word identification and comprehension.