Gifted Children and Creativity

Creativity is a valuable asset possessed by gifted children. Creativity is expressed in the form of fluency of imagination. Nobody tells gifted children how to create the things of their own choice; one idea leads to the other. Gifted children develop ideas of their own and on their own, without copying it from here and there. Interests of a gifted child is intensely focused on achieving his/her goals or to complete the given task at hand.

Gifted children are highly inquisitive and willing to explore new ideas to create new things of their own. Creative thinking is reflected by the gifted children by producing new ideas as responses to a basic idea or theme.

Creativity of gifted children is reflected by their imagination and fantasies. Gifted children with creativity have good guesses about different approaches and they do not hesitate to ask ‘what if’ questions.

Gifted children with creative thinking skills have the ability to develop relationships among unrelated ideas and objects.

Brainstorming is an effective technique that can be used by teachers to enhance creativity among gifted children.

• You are preparing to teach numbers from 1 to 50 in your class. It may be boring for an artistically gifted child who already knows it. To enhance his artistic creative skills and creating his/her interest in the class, you should give him/her an art project involving numbers such as making designs out of numbers and then coloring them with different colors, or you can tell him to draw shapes of different animals or birds using different numbers. This activity will help the creative child to develop his/her talent in multiple directions.

Gifted children are interested in fantasies.

• So to explore their creativity, choose a fantasy theme such as letting them be birds for one day, butterfly for another day etc. Tell gifted children to create poems, songs about their fantasy character. Also ask gifted children to collect information about the behavior of the character they are playing, its way of eating, sleeping etc to grasp the full knowledge about it.