Parents and educators often worry about how gifted students spend their time in the classroom. Rightly so, given that gifted students can often find standard curricula easy or boring. And adolescents in the U.S. typically have six to eight hours of free time each day. This is not a trivial amount of time and should not be ignored by parents of the gifted. A recent study by Duke TIP looked at exactly this.

What is leadership? It involves persuading others to set aside their individual concerns, at least for a time, and pursue a goal that is important to the group. Leadership occurs only when others embrace the leader’s vision and the group’s goals as their own.

I should have seen it earlier. My son Steven gave me the clues, but I didn’t recognize them. When he was 18 months old, he preferred conversations with adults. At two, he wanted to leave the park when too many children were there. In preschool, he was miserable unless he was one-on-one with a favorite friend or teacher. By first grade he was telling us that he had no friends, although he played with kids at school, in chess club, and on the soccer field.

Many parents who homeschool are becoming interested in having their children participate in extracurricular activities and selected classes offered through the public school system. However, many districts are resisting the idea, citing administrative issues regarding resources, transportation, liability, and displacement of other students. States in which the aid distributed to schools is based on student enrollment are more open to the concept and encourage homeschoolers to take courses at their schools.

Editor's note: Julian C. Stanley, who died on August 12, 2005 at the age of 87, established the talent search model when he began the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) at Johns Hopkins University in 1971. He found that grade-level tests did not provide enough information about the abilities of academically talented students. Stanley decided to give a large group of seventh-graders the Scholastic Aptitude Test (now the SAT Reasoning Test).

Mathematically talented students often show an early interest in and facility with numbers. For example, they may learn to tell time at age two and begin adding and subtracting long before they enter kindergarten. Anecdotes shared by parents about their precocious youngsters are helpful in identifying these students initially, but the objective information determined from an appropriate assessment is essential in determining the extent of their abilities and providing them with a challenging level of mathematics.

Beware the summer slide—not the spiraling, thrilling water chute found at your local water park, but the loss of academic skills during the summer months. Math skills often slip the farthest, with students losing an average of 2.6 months of grade level equivalency in computational ability over the summer. In addition, students score lower on standardized tests administered at the end of the summer than at the beginning. How do you prevent these skills from slip-sliding away? While parents may not be able to halt all summer learning loss, there are many ways to reduce it.

Parent question: My 12-year-old son takes little interest in the world around him or in making friends. From early childhood he’s been far more interested in creating elaborate games with his cars; engrossing himself in learning all about trains, space shuttles, and airplanes; and playing computer games. At his gifted school he enjoys the company of other children but doesn’t want to take on the responsibility of friendship. I’ve hosted numerous play dates with his schoolmates, which have ended with my son “tuning out” the other child.

Since we are a multicultural family with immediate relatives in France and Taiwan, our suitcases never gather dust. Our children, Sebastien, Alexandre, and Camille (ages 13, 11, and 3), have already amassed a wealth of travel experiences, such as tasting Belgian waffles in Antwerp, seeing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, viewing Hong Kong from the peak of the island, and climbing medieval castles in Carcasonne.

A new survey reveals that 79 percent of American middle and high school students participate in some sort of extracurricular activity both after school and on weekends. Activities range from sports to music, with 57 percent of students participating in a nonschool activity nearly every day. When asked about their extracurricular activities, students indicate that they enable them to make good friends, learn, and have fun. Sports activities are the most popular among students, with 66 percent participating in them.