Gifting Students a Chance to Advance

For kids that function above the others in their level, school can be something that makes their learning time more harmful than helpful; however, Gifted is a space where those kids can continue to grow.

The Gifted Program offers unique learning opportunities to students that need extra enrichment due to their high capacity to learn and work. The program promotes individual intellectual skills and social strengths. They try to ensure that students who participate in gifted services demonstrate self-directed learning, thinking, research, and communication skills while giving them an opportunity to further their education in a way that would not be possible in a traditional classroom or learning environment.

“The Gifted Program allowed me to collaborate with like minded people in order to accomplish things you can’t accomplish during a regular class,” said Braden Booth (11).

When a child shows gifted potential, teachers will contact the students parents along with administration so it can be discussed on whether this path is the right option for the child or not. If so, the student is given a few tests and is assessed to see where they fall and how they learn. The test doesn’t measure what you have learned, but what you can learn. Ultimately, a student has to meet an I.Q. requirement to qualify for the gifted program.

“For me, the Gifted Program allowed me to exercise my brain instead of “learning” something that I already knew. The gifted program, to me at least, is a place for people who are in need of something just a bit higher education wise than the grade level they are at,” shared Charles Harp (10).

Fair Grove’s Gifted Program sponsor is Mrs. Hubbard. She spends two and a half hours a week per grade with the students in the program, seeing different grades on different days, where the students are usually exploring a big idea or concept in unique ways. When in Gifted, students are creating, imagining, rebuilding, and collaborating.

The Gifted Program makes sure that kids don’t fall through the cracks simply because they don’t fit the conventional mold. They go through topics that ordinary classes don’t cover in school, doing self-led research, obscure history topics, and advanced science were all fair game. “We did a lot of hands-on projects, such as designing a paper airplane that could carry as much weight as possible while still being able to fly,” Harp shared.

For students eligible for Gifted, this could be a great opportunity to further their learning. The Gifted Program creates a great opportunities to capitalize on their learning potential.