Myth No. 3:
There is no need to identify gifted students in the early grades.
Many school
districts do not begin identifying gifted and talented students until third
grade. There is a belief among some educators that giftedness cannot be
properly identified in the early grades. However, the National Association for Gifted Children programming
standards start with pre-kindergarten. The group’s early childhood network
position paper says that “providing engaging, responsive learning environments
… benefit all children, including young gifted children.”
Well,
we all know that I am not opinionated about this at all! (Note Sarcasm) As an educator, that is like telling me that
we cannot be properly identifying special education until 3rd
grade. A gifted child can and oftentimes
does perform better when they are younger prior to us “schooling it out of them”. For more information about that watch this
FANTASTIC video by Sir Ken Robinson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
.
As
a parent, I was truly fortunate to have someone realize that our son was profoundly
gifted and he was tested and started receiving services at 2 ½ years old. Until then, I just assumed all children
sorted animals by kingdom, phylum and class.
However, we had a rude awakening when joining the public school system
to find out that not only did they not test children that age, they did not
provide services. In fact we were told
that all children typically even out around 3rd grade and if we had
just not worked so much with him he would be fitting in better at school. My beautiful, bright, inquisitive boy who
couldn’t wait to go to ‘real’ school (he had been going to an ASU profoundly
gifted program for 2 years twice a week) hated going to school and cried nearly
every day. It was absolutely a horrible
experience for him and us. Why would we
want to put any child through that?
Each
and every child that we come in contact with should be given the opportunity to
be excited about learning something new each day. Anything else is criminal in my book. (Again, not showing any opinions here!)
And
as a side note, I tested three students today, two were 5 and one was 6. The test was a piece of cake for them and of
course they all qualified. The nice
thing is that the Cognitive Abilities Test, is just that: a test for cognitive abilities. I learn so much more than just whether a
child is gifted or not. I can typically
tell a lot about a child, their strengths, weaknesses and possibly if they are
disabled and it has not been caught because their giftedness masks their
disability. I personally believe that
every student should be tested using the CogAt or something similar so that we
have one more data point to use to determine appropriate educational paths.
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