In addition to the CANDO Back to School Picnic on August 19, there are a number of events and deadlines coming up as the start of school approaches:
 

• Illinois Association for Gifted Children (IAGC) and National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) call to action: Consider advocating for the federal TALENT act.
• Weekend enrichment is available in Elgin, Naperville, and at other sites via The Center for Gifted fall weekend workshops.
• IAGC's Carol Morreale Scholarship provides an award of $1000 to a bright student in need. Application deadline is September 1.
• Northwestern University's Midwest Academic Talent Search (NUMATS) has a September 1 deadline for some of the courses available as Gifted Learning Links (GLL), online classes for students in grades K-12.
• The NAGC conference will take place in Indianapolis, November 7-10, 2013, with a parents' day in addition to events for educators and professionals.

Have you seen … ?

• Ian Byrd's blog post, "Three Ways Teachers Battle Students' Giftedness," cites research to support appropriate classroom practices for teaching gifted learners. How do our children learn best?
  
• A podcast series from Prufrock Press is devoted to issues of gifted and talented education.
• Tamara Fisher's blog Unwrapping the Gifted is a good resource for a teacher's insights into the education and nurturing of gifted students, and for advocacy issues surrounding gifted education.
  

Helping our kids find something new to read can sometimes feel like a never-ending quest. How do you find appropriate and engaging books, especially when those children are voracious or reluctant readers?

While many readers work on a system of recommendations from friends, or trial and error, it is nice to have a curated list to start from. There are a number of useful websites and lists online that can serve as guides, helping you and your child branch out and find good books that you might not have heard of yet, and more importantly, that your child may not have read yet!

Here are a few of those lists and links:

• “Find a Book” by Lexile measure This site offers a number of customizable search features, including one you can use to generate a list of books using your child's Lexile measure information (found on your child's MAP scores). You can also find out the Lexile measure of most book titles.
  

• Mensa for Kids Excellence in Reading Award Program This program offers a number of lists by age group (and a T-shirt award for children who read everything on a particular list).

• The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) lists award and honor winners from current and previous years on their website, including books that have been honored with the Newbery Medal and Honor, the Sibert Informational Book Medal, and some listed otherwise as Children's Notable Books.

Of course, teachers and librarians can be great resources as well! Our local libraries maintain many reading lists available online or at the youth services desk.

If you have any reading lists or other resources to share, we'd love to hear about them! Add as a comment below or email us at [email protected].

One of BPS101's 2012-2013 Gifted Committee meetings will be focused on addressing the social and emotional needs of gifted and talented students. In light of this aim, some of our blog posts, including this one, will examine different ideas of what those social and emotional needs might be.

Many gifted children seem to experience the world more intensely than other people. This intensity might manifest itself in various traits a child might exhibit, for example:

• persistently abstract thinking    
  
• constant desire to talk or fidget
  
• heightened sensitivity to sensory input
  
• extreme perfectionism
  
• unusually strong sense of justice
  
• exceptionally intense emotions
  
• deep involvement with fictions and fantasies

These and other intensities were categorized by the Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski (1902-1980) as five distinct “overexcitabilities,” familiar today to many educators, psychologists, and parents. In his understanding, gifted individuals may process information, sensory input, and emotions more deeply, “overexciting” the nervous system. He groups the five overexcitabilities as follows: intellectual, psychomotor, sensory, emotional, and imaginational. (Want to read more about examples of each type? See this page reproduced from the SENG ( Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted) newsletter.)

These overexcitabilites often result in intense behaviors that can be hard for children and teachers to manage from a social as well as an emotional standpoint--in class, or at home. What should be done when a child cries because paper scraps were recycled instead of saved? Or when a child is inconsolable because eraser marks have “ruined” homework? Or when homework or a test does not get completed because a student is indignant that the question uses incorrect grammar or is phrased ambiguously? Ultimately,  parents and teachers can help to channel the energies that spawn such intense reactions into directions that may be more beneficial to the child.

Fortunately, overexcitabilities have many positive manifestations too. For instance, those who are emotionally intense often have a profound empathy and sympathy for other people and for animals. Those who are imaginationally intense are likely to produce powerful creative works. Those who are intellectually intense might be the ones to solve challenging problems that we face as a global community. We can help our children take their own great steps forward when they are ready if we can understand how to help them to manage the challenges the overexcitabilities can pose, as well as to see the rewards they can bring.

To read more about how each of the five overexcitabilities might appear, and some challenges and potential solutions for understanding and dealing with each category in the classroom, see this link to Byrdseed, a blog run by Ian Byrd, a teacher of gifted students in California. Although his blog is written with an audience of fellow educators in mind, this entry in particular speaks to parents and teachers alike. And after all, parents teach their children too! At the end, he helpfully provides links to other references and discussions of Dabrowski's work.

While gathering information for the November 5 district Gifted Committee meeting on the subject of gifted and talented education at the middle school level, we found this recent article on gifted and talented education in The New York Times. This op-ed piece is written by Chester E. Finn, Jr., co-author of a book about exam high schools--schools like our own Illinois Science and Math Academy (IMSA). In his article, “Young, Gifted, and Neglected,” Mr. Finn advocates for more educational opportunities for our nation's gifted and talented students.

Thank you for visiting the CANDO blog! We hope to use this space to share information, articles, and other food for thought about parenting and educating gifted and talented students of all ages.
Have you visited the blog run by our BPS Gifted Specialists? They use the site to keep parents updated on the district's gifted and talented services, link to helpful sites, and remind parents of important dates. In addition, they have made available a PDF of the new district Gifted and Talented Handbook. It's definitely worth a look if you haven't seen it yet. Here's the link: http://bps101gat.blogspot.com/