A guide for parents and teachers
High cognitive potential: traits to watch for and tools to learn more
What giftedness means
Giftedness, also called high cognitive potential, describes a mental functioning that proceeds through rapid connections, deep questions and a lively sensitivity to what happens around it. It concerns a significant number of children in every classroom, and deserves close attention from the earliest years.
In the book these children take the shape of the Sun Children, described as neuro shining: an image that captures their inner light and gives adults new words to talk about their experience.
Signs observed at home
The signs often come from language, from curiosity and from the way a child relates to time. Taken together, they form a coherent picture.
- A rich, precise vocabulary, with sentence structures more mature than the child’s age.
- Questions about origins, the universe, justice and death, asked in earnest.
- A vivid memory for details, dates and stories heard only once.
- Deeply focused passions pursued for months: mythology, space, animals, languages.
- Intense empathy for people and animals, with deep reactions.
- A sophisticated sense of humour, wordplay, refined irony.
- Demanding self criticism: wanting to get things right straight away and measuring against high standards.
Signs observed at school
In class, high potential appears in two opposite forms: bright and engaged, or quiet and apparently distracted. Both express the same hunger for meaning.
- Finishes tasks quickly and immediately looks for new material.
- Prefers talking with adults or with older children.
- Excels in subjects he loves and is inconsistent in the others.
- Impatience with repetition, interest sparked by genuine challenge.
- Personal reflections that carry the lesson beyond the syllabus.
The value of a professional assessment
The observations of family and school find confirmation in an assessment carried out by a psychologist experienced in giftedness, who brings together cognitive tests, interviews and questionnaires. The result describes the child’s profile as a whole and becomes the basis for tailored educational choices.
In Italy, Ministerial Note no. 562 of 3 April 2019 recognised the possibility of including pupils with high cognitive potential within the framework of Special Educational Needs when specific educational requirements emerge. The personalisation of the learning path, and any individual education plan, is assessed by the teaching team or the class council. Readers outside Italy should check the equivalent framework in their own school system, since gifted education provisions vary widely from country to country.
How to support a Sun Child
The first step is naming what the child experiences: the speed of his thinking, the intensity of his feelings, his desire for depth. Receiving words for one’s own experience brings relief and confidence.
From here come simple, steady gestures: protecting his passions, offering books and projects that ask for real commitment, keeping an ongoing dialogue with teachers, and nurturing friendships in which the child feels recognised.
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