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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

4 signs of a highly able learner

Little girl studying hard
Psychologist professor Joan Freeman, who has worked with highly able children for 35 years, explains how to nurture the development of an exceptional learner.

Gifted children are just as different from one another as any other group of children. Some may be lively, into everything and very friendly, while others can be shy and prefer to keep to themselves.

Here are four strong clues which may indicate that you have a highly able child on your hands:

A lively mind

The most noticeable feature of potentially gifted children is the liveliness of their minds. This comes across in many ways, especially in their delight with words.

Even as toddlers they’re usually very quick to spot tiny differences and catch on to unusual associations between ideas.

Awareness

Highly able children use their radar brains to seek and absorb information, sometimes catching your meaning before you’ve reached the end of your sentence.

They copy other people’s behaviour and learn fast from the experience. Sometimes they seem quite grown up because of the way they talk and think, but genuine maturity will come later.

Ability to learn

A keen appetite for learning marks out the highly able child: when they’re given the chance to learn, they grab it.

As they get older, their knowledge often becomes wider and deeper than that of other children of the same age so they seem to be even more intelligent.

Parents might wonder where high-flying children get all their knowledge from. They seem to absorb it from everywhere – television, people’s conversations, the air!

Independence

The clever child takes pride in what they can do. Even in their first few days at proper school, they’re usually outstandingly independent and competent, though some get a shock when they find all the others working at a very much lower level.

Some develop special interests even at nursery school, though these might change. By the time they reach primary school, they may be really beginning to know their way around a subject in a way that marks them out from other children, such as being early to read or master numbers.

Supporting your gifted child

Although their intellectual gifts far outstrip their age, the evidence shows that gifted and talented children develop normally in terms of their emotions. But they sometimes come under extra pressure emotionally: for example, they may face their own special challenges, particularly of high expectations and pressure to achieve.

It is complete acceptance which builds up any child’s self-confidence. And it’s the family that provides the foundations for them to develop their gifts in the future.

How to Raise a Bright Child by Professor Joan Freeman is published by Vermilion.