25 of Our Favorite Gifted Kid Movies
Our social media community and the 优蜜视频 staff weighed in on their favorite movies featuring gifted children and young adults.

The Bright Side of Overexcitabilities in Gifted Children
Because overexcitabilities are often talked about as though they are problems to solve, we wanted to highlight some of the more delightful elements of overexcitabilities in gifted children and adults.

Developing Study Habits and the Gifted Student

Because so many things come naturally to the gifted child, highly able students often do not learn how to study until it is too late. Mark provides some tips for helping gifted students develop study habits.

Mindfulness and the Gifted

优蜜视频 parent and Academy instructor Linnea Pyne discussed Mindfulness as a tool used to address a variety of the needs of gifted children.

12 Lessons About Gifted Kids from Matilda

The lovable title character in Roald Dahl鈥檚 Matilda is a precocious young girl who can teach the world a thing or two about gifted kids.

Gifted 101

For those who need a place to start, we have shared some essentials聽that should help as you seek more information on the gifted child.

Beneath the Surface: Twice-Exceptional Children

Twice-exceptional (or 2E) students 鈥� those who are both gifted and have a learning disability 鈥� have unique needs and challenges that often go unseen and unmet.

College Selection and Admissions for Gifted Students: Resources

Gifted students and their families face special challenges during the college search and application process.聽 优蜜视频 parent and independent college counselor Kate Duey shared some of her favorite resources on the topic with us.

2015 Caroline D. Bradley Scholars Named

Congratulations to the newest class of Caroline D. Bradley Scholars! This year鈥檚 29 Scholars represent 14 states and a wide variety of academic and personal backgrounds.聽 We are ecstatic to have each and every one of them as members of the 优蜜视频 community.

Diversity and Gifted Children: Are We Doing Enough?

There is a need for new strategies in identifying gifted students of diverse cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds to ensure that we are meeting the needs of all gifted children.

Like these posts? 聽to receive more information and resources about gifted youth straight to your inbox.

Gifted students and their families face special challenges during the college search and application process. 优蜜视频 parent and supporter Kate Duey recently spoke to a group of parents and students about these challenges during an 优蜜视频 Gifted Child Parent Support Group Meeting.

Below聽are some of the resources Kate聽recommends聽on college selection and admissions聽for gifted students.

Online Comprehensive Resources

Books for Gifted Applicants聽

Interesting Webpages for Gifted Applicants

Books for All College Applicants

Like this page? to get more gifted resources and information聽delivered straight to聽your inbox.

Lisa is the mother of 3 gifted children and lives outside of San Francisco.

We were 5 minutes into the student-led tour and I knew the school wasn鈥檛 the right place for my son. Our guide led us down the hallway of a beautiful colonial building. The walls were lined with cork board and sheets of brightly colored paper framing announcements and pictures of professors and administrators. 鈥淣o, no, no,鈥� I thought. 鈥淗e鈥檚 going to hate this.鈥�

I was trying to think like a 16 year old boy, or at least, my 16 year old boy. I had promised myself that I would allow him to set his own criteria when evaluating colleges. I admired how he navigated class selection, extracurricular activities and the work/life balance in his high school. I would not substitute my values for his now that he was looking for a college. So I tried to see the college through my son鈥檚 eyes.

It turns out that I was right鈥攈e hated the school. While the environment looked warm and nurturing to me, he felt smothered by the level of support suggested by the cheerfully decorated hallway and confirmed by our tour guide. We made a hasty exit at the tour鈥檚 end, skipping the information session and catching an earlier train to New York City. On the way out, my son said that he was really glad we made the trip. 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 know if I would recognize a bad fit if I saw one. Now I know. I can trust my instincts.鈥�

Thus began my son鈥檚 search for a methodology to assess the colleges we were visiting. What follows are his indicators of college excellence:

1. Personal Freedom

My son is on a quest for autonomy. He wants support at college to be available and encouraged, but not conspicuous. He disapproves of schools with multiple student committees tasked to help freshmen with everything from writing to public speaking skills. If he wants help, he will ask his professor. Jesuit priests in your dorm? Minus 5 points. A campus policy that encourages students to ask professors to lunch and gives them the funds to do it? Plus 10 points.

2. Course Selection

My son asked one question at every tour: 鈥淲here can I get the course catalog?鈥� Sure, you can get the same information online, but the sheer size of the book tells you something about the school. Once he got a hold of the catalog, he dog-eared pages and put stars next to interesting classes. Nothing says 鈥淚 want to go here鈥� more than a beat up course catalog.

Reviewing each school鈥檚 course catalog is necessary to counteract the 鈥淨uiddich Effect.鈥� My son coined the phrase after hearing that his older brother fell in love with any school that offered Quiddich as an extracurricular activity. Later, he learned that EVERY school fields a Quiddich team (one school now offers PE credit). By reviewing the catalogs, my son found that classes that appear exotic at first glance become less extraordinary when they appear in multiple catalogs.

3. Campus Personality

Why would anyone want to go to a humorless college? Quirky behavior on campus indicates that the student body is creative, doesn鈥檛 take itself too seriously and has free time. Top marks went to the school with a pirate a cappella group named ARRR!!! This singing ensemble has a repertoire of sea chanteys and has been known to hijack other a cappella performances.

4. Weather

My oldest son is in college in Chicago. His professor came to class one cold January day with a very red eye. She said that an icy gust of wind burst a blood vessel in her eye鈥�a gust of wind! I find this indicator perfectly appropriate. Flip flops in January will cause a college to rocket up in the rankings.

5. Diversity

My son took one picture during our trip. It was of two groups of students separated by about 20 feet. On one side was a banner with the words 鈥淪top Israeli Apartheid鈥� printed on it. Next to it was the Palestinian flag. On the other side was a banner with the words 鈥淏e Part of the Solution鈥� printed on it with the Israeli flag next to it. Students passed back and forth between the two sides, standing in clusters around the speakers. My son was transfixed. He confessed that wants to debate social policy with a Log Cabin Republican and Middle East diplomacy with someone who lives there.

Here鈥檚 what isn鈥檛 on the list: a prestigious name, famous alumni, notable professors or expensive facilities. I tried to highlight these positive qualities at various times during the trip. At one point, I screamed 鈥淟ook! David Brooks teaches a class called 鈥楬umility!鈥欌�� He looked at me blankly.

We left the East Coast without finding a replacement for the number one position, currently held by a Southern California school. He said that he found number 2, 3 and 4, all interchangeable and clustered substantially below his first love.

I know that he isn鈥檛 done looking at colleges, and some of the colleges he鈥檚 seen may climb and fall in the rankings as he changes the weight of each indicator. The whole point of the trip was to gauge his interest in particular types of schools. In the end, he showed a preference for schools located in cities or large towns with around 5000 undergraduates in the school or nearby. Now that he has created a methodology to evaluate colleges, he can quickly get down to business adding and deleting colleges from his list.

Oh, and there was one more benefit that came from this trip: he found the graduate school he wants to attend.

That鈥檚 the funny thing about dreams. One almost always leads to the next.

Like this post? Please share!

Lisa is the mother of 3 gifted children and lives outside of San Francisco.

It鈥檚 the only fun part of the college application process: the college trip. It鈥檚 the chance for your child to dream before the harsh realities of test scores, class rank and GPAs hit. Best of all, parents are active participants. We get to be accomplices to the dream worlds our children are imagining.

Three years ago, I eagerly anticipated bonding with my oldest son on our whirlwind tour of 6 colleges in the east and one in the Midwest. I memorialized the trip with pictures of him scraping the snow off the windshield of our rented car, waking up with bed head and sampling cannoli in Boston. He was not amused. The defining moment of our trip happened during dinner midway into the week.

鈥淚 haven鈥檛 seen anyone in so long,鈥� he said.

I not only wasn鈥檛 bonding with him, I wasn鈥檛 even someone.

I returned from the trip with a more realistic understanding of my place in his world. I could be the travel agent, chauffeur and advisor, but I did not have a place in his dreams. The trip was his opportunity to imagine a life without me. He had already gotten a head start imagining that world.

I tried to apply the lessons I learned from my oldest son to my middle son鈥檚 college trip. We would see one school a day (with the exception of a quick trip to New York City) and travel solely by public transportation. The pace and mode of transportation would reduce my stress and allow each of us to immerse ourselves in the experience of looking for a college 鈥� separately. For my son, that meant plugging himself into the sounds of Ingrid Michelson and Idina Menzel. For me, it was flipping the pages of The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College.

My son let me set the itinerary. We could only visit 6 or 7 schools, so I made the decision to tour schools of varying size located in suburban, urban and big city locations. This would allow me to gauge his interest in particular types of schools. One of the things they had in common is that they all had strong programs in his areas of interest: International Relations, Politics, Philosophy, Economics, Public Policy and Government. The other thing they had in common is that they are all spectacularly hard to get into. That last part wasn鈥檛 one of my criteria; it just turned out that way. Or, more accurately, I didn鈥檛 make an effort to balance safety, target and reach schools.

I was breaking the first rule of the college application process: manage your child鈥檚 expectations.

I wasn鈥檛 trying to communicate an unreasonably high level of expectations to my son, although it could certainly be seen that way. I was curious. Some group of researchers decided that these were the best schools in the country and lots of students appeared to agree with this conclusion. How else do you get such low acceptance rates? Besides, isn鈥檛 this an area where a gifted kid can dream big? After my husband and I had spent years finding outlets for his passions, was this really the time to tell our son that the admission odds are set against him and he should be more realistic? Without visiting these schools, they would just be names, spoken with reverence by his friends and their parents. He would not know if the fuss was justified until he experienced these mythical institutions, however superficially.

Luckily, the idea of attending an Ivy League college had already lost some of its luster by the time we left for the East Coast. My son had fallen in love two weeks earlier. The object of his affection is a liberal arts college in Southern California. The town, the campus, the classes and the flip flop wearing student body spoke to him. He now had the gold standard against which all other schools would be compared.

If my son felt pressured by my itinerary, he didn鈥檛 complain. In fact, he said that he would have been disappointed had I not taken him to these highly selective schools. He was not ready to inventory his shortcomings. He still wanted the chance to dream. So, bring it on Harvard. Let鈥檚 see if the tingly excitement brought on by an Ivy League name can compare to the warmth generated by the Southern California sun.

Like this post? Please share!