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Some day I think I'd like to design curricula for gifted children. Not many people have the skills to design curricula and also understand gifted kids. Usually "gifted" programs actually just double the busy work.
Instead, I want to, say, have a curriculum for Caleb that has college-level readings, 8th-grade-level discussion questions, and single-sentence to single-paragraph writing responses (since at least some of my gifted brood balk at the idea of handwriting anything!).
Really, there are plenty of materials out there for math/science gifted kids, but almost nothing for verbal/social studies gifted kids. We need a computer-based lesson on Greek/Latin/Germanic roots of words that is adult-level information, with a 5-9 yo sense of humor, and cute little cartoon characters to go with it. You can't find that out there right now!
And nobody's ever going to make it commercially because it isn't commercially viable. We're talking about making stuff that's appealing to one in 300,000 kids (or some ridiculous number like that!). Plus, gifted kids are so individual, what appeals to one might not appeal to another. So it might be an impossible task.
Part of me says "normal kids would value that, too," but I realize that I might not know any normal kids well enough to know that. All my friends are gifted, too, and all their kids are. And I've found that every child I have ever interacted with responds well to the particular ways you have to learn to treat gifted kids, so it's hard for me to know what "normal" is.
Still, I can dream, can't I?
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