Question
Is there a resource you recommend for twice gifted?
Answer
Yes, there are many resources I recommend for twice gifted. The first is Hoagies website (www.hoagiesgifted.org) if you are not familiar with it. There is a woman named Linda Silverman who has written many books with one called Upside-Down Brillance: The Visual Spatial Learner. She has some outstanding practical ideas to help with that. Resources by Renate Caine( and her husband) are excellent. Their work is phenomenal for working with twice gifted children. If you work in a school setting, a resource I have found to be most helpful is a book called How the Gifted Brain Learns by David Sousa. In this book, he evaluates all of the ways we can address gifted learners from the benefit of increasing the curriculum, such as giving algebra to a 3rd grader who is supposed to be doing addition, what are the benefits of this and the negatives as well. He gives a lot of explicit techniques for dealing with this concept of gifted versus learning disabled. Gifted learners are often very divergent thinkers. They often get one idea which takes them to another idea and then off the charts. Unfortunately those children have significant difficulty with convergent thinking. Convergent thinking is their ability to access the skill of knowing what something will look like when it is done and then defining that first. I find breaking down those tasks, clearly drawing them out, and giving them the nonverbal image of what it will look like helps to bring the student back on task when they become divergent.
Sarah Ward, M.S., CCC/SLP has over 16 years of experience in diagnostic evaluations, treatment and case management of children, adolescents and adults with language learning disabilities, nonverbal learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, executive dysfunction, Asperger’s disorders and social pragmatics. Ms. Ward holds a faculty appointment at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions where she provides instruction to graduate level students in the assessment and treatment of individuals with traumatic brain injury and other cognitive communication disorders.
