How do I know if my child is gifted?
There's no single test for it — but there are patterns many families recognize. Parents are often very good at identifying whether their child is likely to be intellectually gifted.
A child who exhibits several of these characteristics may also excel on standardized achievement tests and will frequently outperform their peers on IQ tests.
Does being gifted mean being great at everything?
Children with high academic potential are frequently asynchronous in their development, meaning they may be far beyond their age-mates in some academic areas, but not so advanced in others. This can be confusing for a young child and their family. GATE is adept at recognizing asynchronous academic and social development.
Children with high potential tend to thrive with their cognitive peers — friends who can match and complement their ability to think and speak at a level beyond their chronological age. It makes sense: if your 2nd grader thinks like a 5th grader, then conversations with typical 2nd graders can be frustrating or confusing for all concerned.
Giftedness is far from being everything. We understand that social-emotional skills and qualities such as perseverance, determination, resilience, self-regulation, and open-mindedness are what make people successful in life. GATE creates an environment that requires kids to reach beyond their comfort zones and risk failure. Inquiry-based learning teaches our students that you can try and fail, and then stretch beyond that failure and learn more — by redesigning the experiment, redrawing a floor plan, or making your poem pithier.
Overcoming failure is essential to learning and success. It develops crucial life skills, character, and grit — as described by Paul Tough in his book How Children Succeed.
The SENG Foundation — Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted — has many resources to help families understand the challenges academically gifted children and their families can face.
Explore Gifted Resources →