Gifted Students

For this post I wanted to discuss various ways to help students who are gifted but may also have a learning disability. My oldest is gifted mostly in math however she does ok in the other areas except comprehension she does not seem to understand what she is reading. This can cause some problems since she can read on a 9th grade level when she is only a 6th grader. I finally got her to tell me that when she reads she does not picture what the story is about in her mind. They finally tested her and discovered that she does not sequence very well when you give her a list of directions out of order. I found this very frustrating as I have tried to get the schools to test her since she was in 2nd grade. Well at least she is not a high school student so we hopefully can help her with this problem.

When looking for any signs I may have missed that would have told me this was a problem. The only thing I could come up with was she had a severe lack of imagination from a young age. She never liked to play dolls or dress up. She only liked books with pictures and when she got to old for picture books she did not like to read anymore. I think if I had tried to get her to play house more or discussed what was happening during reading time, she might have been better at sequencing. I did discover something a few months ago that might have helped her and kicked myself for not thinking of it sooner. It seems so simple and that is felt stories they use pictures but you have to act out what you are hearing with movable figures so they are really hands on. I thought gosh I could have used paper figures for that matter but they are not as durable. I started using them with my other children and the kids loved them. I also discovered from a teacher at my daughters school that I could have done and am now doing this picture with a sentence game. You have a short phrase that is very descriptive and have the student draw what they think it should look like. This has helped some as now she has to think about what the sentence is saying and we can see what she is really getting out of her reading.
Her math is a different problem all of its own. She can do math like a twenty year old so most math for her age bores her senseless. I have struggled to get the schools to challenge her on a higher level but not had much success.