Parenting and teaching a gifted teen requires extra emphasis on guiding teenagers through the education system. When a child is gifted, he or she needs more opportunities in order to live up to his or her full potential. These four tips could help parents and teachers to cater to the needs of their gifted teens.
Offer Additional Opportunities to Expand on Subjects
When a teenager is gifted in a particular subject, teachers could offer the student the opportunity to go in-depth and expand upon the subject. For example, if a teenager is gifted in the subject of chemistry, the student could be allowed to move into deeper subject matter such as benzene ring chemistry and other aspects of organic chemistry. Teenagers who are gifted in math could go deeper into a subject of interest, such as logistic regression. By providing these opportunities, teachers can help gifted kids to learn more on their own while offering support and learning resources as needed.
Earn a High School Diploma Online
In some cases, a traditional high school environment is not the best choice for a teen who is gifted. Earning a high school diploma online affords a gifted student the flexibility to explore the subject matter in a way that makes more sense to him or her. Earning a high school diploma online allows for some flexibility of subjects, such as the inclusion of outside arts classes. In some learning environments, gifted students are bullied because of their mental talents. Earning a high school diploma online allows gifted students to get out of a bullying situation, including related bullying environments such as the bus or the playground.
Help Teens Challenge Themselves
Parents and teachers can also help teens to challenge themselves. Some gifted teenagers get bored with the subject matter and have lower grades simply because they lose interest in what they are doing. By offering more opportunities for gifted teens to challenge themselves, parents and teachers can ensure that kids remain interested and are able to advance in their education. Some ways that parents and teachers could help teens to challenge themselves include connecting teens with mentoring programs or internship programs in the area that they are gifted in. For example, a teenager who is gifted in chemistry could be connected with a university research chemist during the summer break in order to learn more and get a sense for what his or her future career could be.
Provide Gifted Teens Chances to Highlight Skills
Parents and teachers could look for opportunities that allow gifted teens the chance to highlight their skills. For example, science fairs give a student the chance to develop an idea around a project, set up the inquiry, conduct an experiment, draw a conclusion and propose additional questions that could be looked into in the future. Summertime workshops also give gifted teens the chance to highlight their skills with other teens who are in a similar situation. For example, women in engineering summer programs give teenage girls the chance to learn more about careers in engineering and connect with women who are already working as engineers. They would be given a project to work on and then demonstrate the project and results to the rest of the group.
Helping a gifted teen to pursue his or her passion could be a rewarding experience for parents and teachers. Each teen student learns and demonstrates skills in a different way, so it might take a few tries in order to find a solution that works the best. The time that you spend helping your gifted student to learn and discover will be well worth your investment.