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Hi everyone! This is my 8th year teaching elementary school. I'm currently working on getting my gifted certification. I have a question that has been on my mind. The social development of gifted students is such a crucial part of educating the whole child. Many of the gifted children at my school struggle with social interactions with peers. My question is two-fold:
1) How do you address social development with your gifted students? What are some activities/methods you use to help them improve their social skills?
2) How do you have time? Our gifted students only receive 45 minutes of daily gifted resource education. They work on such in-depth projects that time is precious.
Thank you so much for your guidance and support. I'm looking forward to becoming an active member of this board. Allyson

Enroll them in Cotillion?

Do the gifted children at your school really struggle with social interaction with peers, or do they struggle with social interaction with children who differ greatly from them in knowledge, interests, and abilities? Kids who struggle with social interaction with actual peers might have some 2E issues going on. Being gifted doesn't preclude having Asperger's, ADHD, NVLD, prosopagnosia, or other disabilities that can make it hard to navigate social situations.

If it is that they struggle with social interaction with children who are very different from them, I would look carefully at what you are hoping to see, and ask yourself if it is really reasonable. Schools vary a great deal in what their expectations of "good social skills" for gifted kids look like.

It is reasonable to expect that gifted kids won't insult the other kids and will treat them with respect, (as long as the other kids aren't bullying or harassing the gifted kids first, and are expected to treat the gifted kids with respect, too.) It is not reasonable to expect that gifted kids will stop reading advanced books, using high-level vocabulary, or asking penetrating questions in class; if doing such things hurts their social relationships or makes them targets for bullying, this is a good indication that they are not in a class of their academic peers, and they should be placed in a class with other children working at their level so they don't have to dumb themselves down to get along.

It is reasonable to expect gifted children to engage in some quiet activity, such as reading or drawing or origami at their desks, or to quietly excuse themselves to go to the gifted resource room to work on independent projects when they are finished with their work, to refrain from disrupting the classroom while others are still working. It is not reasonable to expect that they will sit quietly at their desks with nothing to do, or that they will accept having to do additional work without complaint (particularly if it is boring, low-level work, at least from their perspective).

It is probably not reasonable to expect or require gifted kids, particularly highly gifted kids, to form strong friendships with people who don't share their interests and who who can't get their jokes. It is not "teaching good social skills" to expect gifted kids to be miserable and give up who they are and what they enjoy to make others comfortable.

This is probably not what you were looking for. Sorry. [/rant]

Because my son is accelerated 5 years he doesn't really have a social network at school. In his words "It's just not cool to hang out with the little kid". But he does have good realtionships as far as being part of group projects etc. For honest friendships, we look outside of school. He has a few good friends that understand him and like to hang out. I foster those relationships.

My son believes that as he gets older, the kids at school will be more willing to spend time with him. He thinks that for now they are too busy trying to garner status and image. Once they figure out where they fit, they'll stop worrying so much about what people think.

Ally: This all depends on what you mean when you use the word "peers." You mentioned that the kids only get a 45-minute pull-out for gifted services, which would typically be a time spent in structured activities. This might be the only time all day they're in a group with their true peers, and the structured environment doesn't lend itself to developing social skills. Kids need unstructured time together to work on that.

The rest of the day these kids are probably with their age peers, who are far behind them intellectually (and possibly socially), which lends itself to a lot of social problems.

So if the question is, "What can I, the gifted teacher, do about the problem in this environment?", the answer is probably, "Not much." It would take a lot of creativity to come up with classroom activities which meet all of these competing criteria:

- Fulfills the requirements of the gifted program.
- Provides the children with unstructured time to interact.
- Fits into the brief 45 minutes you see these kids each day.

This is why so many of us parents here go to bat for our children to spend more time with true peers, as opposed to spending most of the day in a class with kids the same age. Although I'm currently arguing with my DD's school about getting her a more challenging environment, it's the cognitive domain I'm least concerned about. But by placing her in the appropriate environment for her achievement level, I expect her to find more true peers, which would do wonders for her social and emotional domains... the ones I'm REALLY concerned about.

I have to ak what you mean by "peers"? If you are talking same age, then some social "problems" you are seeing might really just be poor fit. As dd's developmetal psy said about her age mayes "0f course the kids don't fit her! How could they? She has nothing in common with them but age!" this was when she was almost 4, but he went on to say that it is like putting a 2nd grader in with a class of preschoolers all day and expecting that child to make friends. It's not goingbto happen.
Now should a gifted child be expected to be kind, considerate, and respectfful to their age peers... Absolutly! But if expecting socially for them to thrive in a seeting like I described is in my opinon, not fair. If in an appropriate setting the child still struggles, I would look at 2e issues. Just my 2 cents.

I really need to save this one. Aculady I love your posts--this one is so true.

See Cluster Grouping
http://www.pvschools.net/gifted/k-4clustergrouping.html

Hi Allyson - Welcome - Glad you are here...
Sad to say that each child is different, and it is probably best if you try brainstorming specific issues with Child X, etc. Of course that may not be appropriate on this open forum, have you tried ?
http://www.davidsongifted.org/edguild/Article/Educators_Guild_Online_Community_332.aspx

As a parent, I'll put in a plug for talking to the parents and seeing what they see as the most important way for you to use the time availible. Sometimes Gifted Specialists have been able to set up a lunch date with a group of kids to adress the social needs in a more relaxed atmousphere. Sometimes social issues come up with kids within the identified group.

I think a lot of the ideas in Transforming the Difficult Child Workbook by Lisa Bravo can be modified for the classroom to work on building social skills. I know that Bravo has a new workbook orriented towards the classroom, but I don't think it's quite in print yet -

Amazon.com: Notching Up The Nurtured Heart Approach Workbook ...www.amazon.com/Notching-Nurtured-Heart-Approach-Workbook/...Cached
... Up the Nurtured Heart Approach, Howard Glasser gave us specific techniques on how to deepen our practice of the approach. In this accompanying workbook

Another good approach to use this forum, is to review your own gifted history - to talk about your own life, the lives of gifted friends or family members, so that you will be as baggage-free as possible. As a parent, this has been an important step in being the best possible parent for my gifted child. Hearing that what I went through is the same as what other kids went through makes so much of a difference. As I let go of my own fears and worries, I have more space to see that what my son is going through is both similar and different in very important ways to what I went through, and his needs are different that what mine were.

A different thought, what lots of gifted people of all ages need is a place to be proud and admired for their accomplisments - an audience, if you will. As a student in elementary school, I knew that I was outperforming my classmates in certian ways, but that didn't bring any satisfaction because there was no effort involved, so it made me distrust that whole aspect of life. I tried competing with adults, and found myself very much a failure in comparison to adults. So if you have any brags to share, your own or your students, we would love to hear about it.

Finally, I like to think about contingency. I was always looking for my son to be in situations where if he put in more effort, he got a better result. Elementary school was tough, because he got *100* and Smiley A+ for work that required almost no effort, but in other areas, he could work and work and work and see zero imporvement. Finally, now that he is 15, and in a very good fit school, he has unlocked the key inside himeslf to be able to persevere and keep working until he sees the payoff. I'm so proud of him. Yippee! I knew that it was my job to keep looking for opportunities for him to have the experience of 'more effort=more reward.'

Smiles,
Grinity

My son only went to kindergarten at our public school. He didn't fit in socially. He was the second youngest kid in the class and the only one able to read at a 5th grade level. The other kids couldn't read more than a few words. He spent recess talking to the teachers about interesting things he had learned at home. At school they wanted him to spend a lot of time coloring and doing crafts and he just wanted to learn. He didn't fit in physically either. He had a mild disability that affected him physically and had to avoid bullies who were a year older but in the same grade with him. The principal and two teachers recommended that we homeschool. One of those teachers, who had experience with gifted kids, thought he might be highly gifted and kept telling me that I could homeschool my son. I did worry about social development because he was the only child at home and there were no other kids in our neighborhood. I asked the superintendent if I could take my son to recess only and stay there to watch him but they would not allow it because of liability issues. The nearest park with playground equipment was 40 minutes away so my son didn't get to learn any social skills on the playground.

I think the one thing that helped my son was drama and musical theater where he worked together with other gifted kids and he was allowed to have friends three or four years older and nobody thought it was strange. My son has only had one friend his age and he was also gifted. One day a few years ago my son teased an older friend about liking a particular girl and he mimicked the way his friend talked to her. His friend said okay, I can do an imitation of you too and he said something like "blah, blah, blah wikipedia, blah blah blah technology" and apparently my son got it. I think it took that for my son to realize that his friend wasn't as interested in all the things he had been telling him about and that he needed to limit what he talked about to only the things the friend was interested in. Once he learned that lesson he became a much more reserved kid. He also learned that he would have to go online to find other people who shared his interests that were different from his friends' interests.

The higher level vocabulary my son seemed to create a social problem, even around adults in our small town. Since my son was homeschooled, read a lot, and was only around people who used a higher level vocabulary, he had no idea which words the average kids his age knew.

One of the best things about acting was learning about the character he was playing. In a similar way he "studied" other kids his age and he said he could, if he wanted to, talk like them and act like them but he just doesn't have any desire to do this. He said the boys his age always talked about things he just wasn't interested in like sports and fishing and hunting. He was interested in sociology and psychology at the time. Just for fun we decided to wear "socially acceptable" sports T-shirts to walk around our small town to see if we somehow fit in better socially. People did talk to him more. They would ask him what sports he played and when he told them he didn't play sports, that he was in musical theater, the conversation was over. At 13 he isn't as willing to change himself to fit in with kids or adults he has nothing in common with.

My adult "socially gifted" former cheerleader daughter gives her little brother advice every day about social development. But he said he had advice for her too. His advice to her after she had gone through several football player and body builder boyfriends who turned out to be jerks was to find a guy that likes to read. She did and in some ways her new "cute nerd" boyfriend is just wonderful but it bothers her that he doesn't have muscles because he spends too much time reading and he doesn't wear the right clothes because he has no clue how to dress well. My son told me yesterday that she would try "socially rehabilitate" him. He knew this because his sister was always trying to do this to him. I have to say that this is really helping my son and the clothes she picks out for my son look really good on him. She takes him to visit her friends sometimes when she visits. She says that socially he fits in very well--with adult friends. We are hoping that he will fit in socially in college.