Gifted Education
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Gifted Students Need Gifted Peers: It’s About More Than Academics
Beth Smith, M. Ed. |#smithingifted | Gifted Education | Learning & Innovation When we talk about meeting the needs of gifted students, the conversation often focuses on curriculum, acceleration, differentiation, and academic challenge. But there is another important component of gifted education that sometimes gets overlooked. Gifted students need opportunities to interact with other gifted…
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Gifted Is More Than Just a Deep Dive!
Gifted Is More Than Just a Deep Dive! Gifted education is about more than providing deeper or more elaborate assignments. While depth and complexity are important, gifted students also need acceleration, curriculum compacting, meaningful challenges, and opportunities to explore new learning. Effective gifted instruction begins by identifying what students already know and determining what they…
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Stop Researching Other Countries: Let Students Become Local Data Experts
The Global Innovation Lab: Every Drop Counts transforms traditional country research into an authentic global collaboration. Each classroom investigates its own community’s water sources, use, challenges, and conservation efforts before contributing findings to a shared dashboard. Students compare common indicators, question patterns and differences, and consider the context behind the data. They then use what…
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What Real Detectives Can Teach Students About Evidence—and Assumptions
In the gifted classroom, I often ask students to become detectives. They examine primary sources, investigate the Roswell UFO story, study ocean mystery files, solve BreakoutEDU challenges, and analyze competing explanations. I even use detective badges—not as classroom fluff, but as a reminder that students are expected to observe carefully, ask strong questions, and support…
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🕵️ Why I Love the Detective Badge in My Gifted Classroom
In the #smithingifted classroom, Detective Badges aren’t just for fun—they represent a mindset of curiosity, investigation, and evidence-based thinking. Students learn to look closer, ask better questions, analyze evidence, solve problems, and defend their conclusions across reading, STEM, coding, history, and more. The badge may be small, but its message is powerful: Don’t just answer—investigate,…
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#smithingifted Teacher Lab: Where Teaching Ideas Get Tested
The #smithingifted Teacher Lab is a place where teaching ideas move from theory into real classrooms. I’ll share the successes, challenges, surprises, and adjustments that come from using gifted education, STEM, robotics, technology, and creative-thinking strategies with real students. But the Teacher Lab isn’t just about my classroom—teachers who use #smithingifted curriculum can share their…
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Why I Start Gifted Class with the BreakoutEDU Puzzle of the Day 🔐🧠
This blog post explains how using the BreakoutEDU Puzzle of the Day at the beginning of gifted class helps students build critical thinking, problem-solving, perseverance, collaboration, and flexible thinking. These quick puzzles encourage productive struggle, curiosity, pattern recognition, and deeper reasoning while also giving teachers valuable insight into how students approach challenges. It’s a simple…
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✍️ When Messy Handwriting Meets a Gifted Brain: Why Cursive May Help
Gifted students often have ideas that move faster than their handwriting. For some students, cursive can help by making writing feel smoother, more rhythmic, and more automatic because letters connect instead of being formed one at a time. Cursive may also encourage students to slow down, notice patterns, and pay closer attention to letter formation.…
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More Than a Novel Study: 5th Grade Gifted Students Read Refugee by Alan Gratz
📚 What happens when gifted 5th graders read a book that refuses to give them simple answers? By Beth Smith, M. Ed. | #smithingifted That is exactly what we are discovering as we begin our study of Refugee by Alan Gratz. This novel follows three young people whose stories take place during very different moments…
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When a Teacher Says, “I Don’t Know How They Are in Gifted”
A message to parents of gifted children By Beth Smith, M. Ed | #smithingifted Your child comes home and tells you something that makes your heart sink. Maybe a classroom teacher said: “I don’t know how they are in gifted.” Or perhaps the comment was made directly to you during a conference: “I just don’t…