Every gifted/highly able child is different but some of the common characteristics are:
- Humour: Keen sense of the absurd; understands subtleties of humour beyond age level
- Great intellectual curiosity: Intense desire to know, do, feel, create or understand; sometimes described as a ‘sponge’ who absorbs knowledge easily and enthusiastically
- Knowledge: wide general knowledge of topics beyond peer group level
- Interests: passionate interests, sometimes fleeting but sometimes long-lived
- Communication / Expressiveness: Extraordinary ability to convey meaning or emotion through words, actions, symbols, sounds or media;
- Vocabulary: extraordinarily well developed oral language skills and vocabulary
- Inquiry: Probing exploration, observation or experimentation with events, objects, ideas, feelings, sounds, symbols or media
- Problem-solving: Outstanding ability to bring order to chaos through the invention and monitoring of paths to a goal; enjoyment of challenge
- Sensitivity: Unusually open, perceptive or responsive to experiences, feelings and to others; has a strong sense of social justice
- Intensity: Often feels very deeply and will be concerned about issues beyond what is usual for their years
- Perfectionism: can set very high standards for him/herself –this can be positive but often becomes
- debilitating
- Intuition: Sudden recognition of connections or deeper meanings without conscious awareness of reasoning or thought
- Reasoning: Possess superior powers of reasoning, of dealing with abstractions, of generalising from specific facts, of understanding meanings, and of seeing relationships.
- Imagination/Creativity: Extraordinary capacity for ingenious, flexible use of ideas, processes or materials
- Memory/Understanding: Unusual capacity to acquire, integrate, retain and retrieve information or skills
- Learning: Ability to acquire sophisticated understandings with amazing speed and apparent ease. Requires very little repetition or re-enforcement of new learnings
- Concentration and alertness: Shows alertness and quick response to new ideas; Has a long attention spanwhich allows him/her to concentrate on and persevere in solving problems and pursuing interests (not
- necessarily school related).
- Interaction with others: Can tend to dominate others or direct their activities. Can sometimes appear poorlysocialised with chronological age peers (a child’s social peers correspond more closely to mental, rather than age peers )
- Sometimes has a fantasy friend
- Please note:
- not all children will have all these characteristics
- these characteristics may not be reflected in school performance
- underachievement is quite common in gifted children which can make identification difficult
- it is possible for a child to be gifted whilst having a specific learning disability
- Reference: http://www.gateways.edu.au/gifted-and-talented
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