Identify an outstanding child so that you can meet her specific needs. Joan Smutny, Director of the Center for Gifted at National-Louis University in Evanston, Illinois, said that "over 500,000 gifted children are born every year, but the teachers do not have the training to recognize them in the classroom." The first step in improving the attention of an outstanding student is to simply recognize that she has special needs that are not being met by the prevailing curriculum.
Allow the gifted child to learn at his own speed to prevent boredom. The National Association for Gifted Children suggests that you should let kids skip ahead a grade or two, even if it is only in one or two specified subjects in which the student is bored. This will allow the student to push himself and to explore new ideas to satisfy his hunger for learning. The alternative is boredom and poor-satisfaction control, meaning that he cannot concentrate on activities that are not exciting enough.
Cluster the gifted students together into a group and let them do a creative group project together. This will allow the group to look at the required curriculum in a way that lets them explore it more deeply than if they were working in standard group.
Find an older child to serve as an intellectual outlet and a mentor to the gifted child, who might not have any peers who challenge them. Outstanding children can have trouble fitting in socially with their peers because both they and their peers know that they are different from each other.
Talk with the child about difficult situations and how to resolve them. Once you have made sure the gifted student is properly stimulated, you still may need to give her tools to focus attention and deal with problems. Joan Smutny says that gifted kids with attention problems need to learn how to cope with the issues and environments they face. She says parents and teachers can discuss with their children how characters in books and movies overcame adversity in their lives.