by Laura Lovell

Created on: November 25, 2009

Having raised a gifted child for 8 years now, I have learned that gifted children need enrichment activities to exercise their minds every day. I also have a child with ADHD, who needs to exercise his body each day just as much as my 8 year old needs to exercise her brain.

If either one of them doesn't succeed in getting that pent up energy out of their system, whether it is physical or mental, they will show that frustration through their behavior later in the day or at night. When my 8 year old daughter was in Kindergarten she would come home on Friday with a homework packet that was about 8 pages of work to do the following week and return it again on Friday.

Not my daughter! She would rush to her desk, complete all 8 pages of her homework in 30 minutes. Then she would cry because she had no more homework to do. I learned right then and there that I had to compensate for her above average ability with something or she would be unhappy all the time. She needed mental stimulation and challenges on a regular basis and the classroom activities was just not entirely enough for her. I would have her do projects, like lapbooking and crafts to busy herself but continue to learn.

Now that she is 8, I have taught her what I think is her most exciting enrichment activity, Powerpoint. Yes! Powerpoint, like you have in a presentation or a meeting. You see I taught her the basics in copy and pasting information from the Internet (kids safe browsers and content of course, with parental lock) onto the Powerpoint pages to create a research report presentation. She can share it with friends, family and her teacher. Since we now homeschool, I assign her a new report every month, so that she can work on it at her own pace, and she has responded unbelievably well. After a few sessions on Powerpoint, I can no longer direct her, she now knows her way around the program much better than I do. She decided to do her first project on dinosaurs and began researching all the kinds of dinosaurs, she would look them up, then copy and paste. She used the shape insert button to make stick men out of lines and circles and even figured out to insert a graph with actual data that separated the carnivores from the herbivores. After 2 weeks of work in her spare time only, she ended up with a 37 page Powerpoint presentation, complete with title pages, end page and pictures from the clip art section displaying dozens of dinosaurs.

This helps get her mental energy out and it helps her learn, she doesn't feel any pressure to have to do it, but often she enjoys it and will do it when she feels up to it, but mainly she really gets into it and learns so much. Gifted children need an outlet like other kids, but the outlet they need is more challenging than maybe even you know.

Learn more about this author, Laura Lovell.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.