Helping Gifted Children Soar; A practical guide for parents and teachers, 2nd edition
By Carol Strip Whitney, Ph. D., with Gretchen Hirsch
While reading this book, if you find yourself saying “yes, yes, yes” You are discovering why your gifted child acts the way s/he does.
It has been over ten years since Dr. Whitney wrote the first edition of this book. Today she writes “When I wrote the first edition of Helping Children Soar, the world was a very different place. No one had heard of Twitter or Facebook, students weren’t texting, and few, if any, teachers had access to interactive white boards. Today, technology is present everywhere in children’s lives. They are online and in touch in ways previous generations cold not have imagined. Opportunities exist in careers that were never dreamed of, and what children need to learn for these careers is very different.
Classrooms are different, too, with great attention to state standard, proficiency, and high-stakes testing for every student. Today, grade cards are given out by the states, not to students, but to districts and individual schools based on achievement test scores and student yearly progress. These school “report cards” have wide-ranging effects on district funding, programming, and staffing as schools feel pressure to reach high performance standards.
What hasn’t changed is the fact that gifted children are being born every day, and parents and teachers still wonder about how to meet their special academic, social, and emotional needs.
In the United States today, there are at least three million children who are identified as gifted .. And every single one of them is at risk of not being able to fully realize his or her potential.
Although most gifted children have few psychological problems and enjoy healthy self-esteem and relationships, many gifted students, bored and frustrated by schools that don’t challenge them and families who don’t understand them, will become antisocial or depressed and end up in the justice system or the medical/psychological establishment.
I have revised and updated this book with new information, examples, stories, and research. This book is written equally for parents and for teachers.”
The book is written in three parts.
Part I An Introduction to Giftedness
Chapter 1 The World’s Biggest, Highest, Longest Roller Coaster
Chapter 2 Is My Child Gifted - Or Just Smart?
Part II Gifted Children and School
Chapter 3 Testing and Screening: How Schools Identify Giftedness
Chapter 4 Parents and Teachers: Understanding One Another
Chapter 5 Helping Gifted Children Learn
Chapter 6 The Ideal Classroom: Making It Work
Chapter 7 Additional Learning Options for Gifted Children: Types of Acceleration
Chapter 8 Implementing Gifted Education Options
Part III Parenting and Teaching Strategies that Work
Chapter 9 Building Trust, Building Relationships
Chapter 10 Accepting Gifted Children
Chapter 11 Supporting Gifted Children: Discipline and Limits - An Essential Supportive Strategy
Chapter 12 Parents and Teachers: Working Together for the Child’s Sake
Chapter 13 Questions and Answers
Chapter 14 A New Story of Hope
Carol Strip Whitney, Ph.D., is a gifted education specialist for the Oxford Enrichment Center, located just outside of Columbus, Ohio. Previously, she initiated and built the Dublin, Ohio gifted program and also started the first highly gifted magnet program in the state of Ohio.
Dr. Whitney completed her Ph.D. at The Ohio State University in Curriculum for addressing the social-emotional needs of gifted adolescents, and she remains an adjunct professor at OSU in areas of cognition, learning styles, and creativity. She also continues to conduct conference presentations across the country.
She has now written three books on gifted education, including the first edition of Helping Gifted Children Soar (2000) and A Love for Learning: Motivation and the Gifted Child (2007), which is a four-time award-winner.
Gretchen Hirsch is the author of Womanhours: A 21-Day Time Management Plan that Works; Talking Your Way to the Top: Business English that Works; and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Difficult Conversations. She is co-author, with Jay Wilkerson, of Bud Wilkerson: An Intimate Portrait of an American Legend and co-author, with Carol Strip Whitney, of A Love for Learning: Motivation and the Gifted Child. She has also written a novel, Back Again to Me.
I highly recommend this book, as I did on it’s back cover. It makes a great Christmas gift or stocking stuffer. It is available now at Great Potential Press at www.giftedbooks.com or Toll-Free 888-946-2314 (paperback) for $19.95. As of now, the 2nd edition is not yet available on amazon.com.
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Dick Kantenberger
Gifted Education Writer at Examiner.com
Board of Directors and Head of Business Development at Rainard School for Gifted Students
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