Customer Reviews

5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options

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This book was first published in 2005 under a different title. It was renamed and given a new cover in 2009 because both the author and the publisher believed the extensive case study material in the book wasn't described well enough by the old title. To see reviews, go to the older listing Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind

This unique book gives developmental milestones for five levels of gifted children, and then talks about the educational issues and school planning that is involved for each level. It is a truly excellent resource! If your can't get it here or from your local bookstore, get it directly from the publisher. It is worth it!

When your child's development rarely matches development charts, this is the book for you!

Our son was always very advanced, but when he taught himself to read at 1, followed by addition and subtraction at 2, we found very little information to help us. Having a book that accurately tells us what similar children do as they grow older has been wonderful. It's easier to plan for the future (and schooling) if you know what has worked (or not) for other children.

This book helps you to determine how gifted your child might be and how their development will differ based on that. If you have a highly gifted child like ours, another great book is Exceptionally Gifted Children, by Miraca Gross.

I really respect what Ruf has to say. I have enjoyed her work that is available elsewhere and found it to be helpful. I believe she is or should be one of the icons in this field, along with Renzulli and Dabrowski. You should know that the subtitle of this book is a bit misleading. That being said, what is lacking in this resource is fairly typical for books on this issue. To situate myself, I am a public school teacher with no children of my own. As somebody looking for ways to improve the educational experience of the gifted students in my class, there is not much helpful information here for me.

This book is great at creating a sense of, "We are not alone," for the parents of gifted children. The sampled parental accounts of struggles to get the unique educational needs of their unique children recognized and met at school are very effective at building empathy. There is specific, detailed information about development milestones of children at different levels of giftedness. As a parent, former teacher, and former district administrator, Ruf does have quite a bit of insight. This is particularly helpful in explaining how American school districts came to be such bad environments for gifted children at the levels Ruf calls 2-5.

What I do not find is much practical information about what actually works for gifted children. That discussion seems to be pretty much confined to pages 287-314. Even the conclusion of that chapter is still trying to persuade the reader that, "...teaching everyone the same material in the same way will never make all people the same," or "It will take a great change of perspective and a letting go of the traditional and familiar..."

It seems the original title "Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind" was a more accurate one.

For more practical advice for the classroom, you might want to bite the bullet and spend the dough on Methods and Materials for Teaching the Gifted by Karnes and Bean.