Volume 27 Issue 5 02 Mar 2018 15 Adar 5778

Parenting and teaching high-ability students

Colleen Elkins – Gifted and Talented Co‑ordinator K‑6

Dr Sylvia Rimm is renowned in the education world for her dedication to gifted children and their families. Her Laws of Parenting are well known by some, but are always worth re-visiting. The first 6 are listed below, with some discussion following.

Rule number 4 is often apparent within our high achieving students.

A recent example:  An early reader in Kindergarten was asked to read a page of 40 words to a teacher. He stumbled on 2 words and both times he took pains to explain why he had made an error. He could not sit comfortably with having made an error and was perhaps fearful of the repercussions. We need to use encouraging language to remind students that they are still learning and to focus on the 38 words that they did get correct.

This is an essential conversation for us to have with our children/students, in order to remove the expectation of perfection.

Number 5 can quite often be an offshoot of Number 4. Some highly capable students are petrified into non-action for fear of not completing a task to perfection.

To assist with this, breaking a task down into practical, written steps and encouraging the child to just cover the 1st step, to get started is often helpful.

Remember to praise them along the way for their effort, trying to bring their best thinking to the task and for starting!

Let’s tell our children about things like WD40; named that because it took the inventors 40 attempts to design the correct formula for the spray.

www.wd40.com/cool-stuff/history

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’ 

Michael Jordan

For more information about Sylvia Rimm, see the link below.

www.sylviaimm.com/bio.html

Source: Excerpted from Why Bright Kids Get Poor Grades (2008, Great Potential Press). ©1995 by Sylvia B. Rimm.