Search Database

For Gifted Students: Study Skills

• Organizations: National

  Sylvan Learning Center

  Sylvan Learning Center creates confident, independent students by discovering and targeting the causes of academic frustrations. Using the results of a comprehensive Skills Assessment, they create a personalized curriculum that addresses and eliminates underlying issues. Through positive reinforcement and their unique instructional method known as Mastery Learning, they ensure that each student achieves success. What's more, academic success translates into improved confidence and enthusiasm for learning — qualities that help students well beyond their years in school.

• Printed Materials: Books

  50 Graphic Organizers for Reading, Writing & More

  This book is a valuable resource that includes 50 reproducible templates, student samples, step-by-step directions and strategies to support every learner. The organizers are perfect for note taking, planning, presentation, and review. Includes organizers for reading, writing, math, social studies, and science.
  

  Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking (6th Ed.)

  This highly popular text helps students bridge the gap between simple memorization/blind acceptance of information and the greater challenge of critical analysis and synthesis. It teaches them to react rationally to alternative points of view and helps them develop a solid foundation for making personal choices about what to accept and what to reject as they read and listen.

  Becoming a Master Student: Tools, Techniques, Hints, Ideas, Illustrations, Examples, Methods, Procedures, Processes, Skills, Resources and Suggestions for Success

  This book covers numerous topics that are necessary to become a master student, such as time management, mnemonic techniques, types of reading, note taking, techniques for test-taking, critical thinking and problem solving, techniques for writing, personal relationships, and health. Click here to read a review of this book.

  Ending the Homework Hassle: Understanding, Preventing, and Solving School Performance Problems

  This book gives advice and parenting strategies for helping students handle homework in a productive and positive manner.

  Get Off My Brain: A Survival Guide for Lazy Students (Bored, Frustrated and Otherwise Sick of School)

  A humorous and irreverent guide to how "lazy" (i.e. "bored, frustrated, and otherwise sick of school") students can survive the tedium of school, and maybe even have fun doing it. A guide for teens who are bored and frustrated at school, and need motivational skills.

  Home school, high school, and beyond: A time management, career exploration, organization, and study

  This book/course is designed to help teens become increasingly independent in planning and managing their own homeschooling programs. Sections include goal-setting; making a four-year high school plan; working out a yearly plan; planning individual courses; developing and completing course assignments and projects; scheduling; record-keeping; and planning for post-secondary education. The book contains many helpful, reproducible forms that will streamline the planning and recordkeeping tasks of home schooling for many families. Transcript format options are included. It is nominally coming from a Christian perspective, but can easily be adapted to students of any faith, or none.

  How to Do Homework Without Throwing Up (Laugh & Learn)

  "DO NOT read this book if you love doing HOMEWORK!" This book has funny comments, cartoons and suggestions to cope with the not always funny subject of doing homework. It contains valuable homework skills and good ideas.

  Learning to Learn: Strengthening Study Skills and Brain Power

  This book by Gloria Frender delivers some great tools to help students achieve success in both school and life. Practical hints are useful to parents, teachers or anyone wanting a hands-on guide on "learning how to learn."

  McGraw-Hill/Steck-Vaughn Test Prep Books Grades 1-8

  This series of Test Prep books are the first program ever developed to help students become more familiar with the test-taking experience. The lessons in the books were created after an analysis of five of the most popular achievement tests. The content reflects the types of material that students will encounter when testing.

  Organizing Thinking: Book One: Graphic Organizers

  A handbook of lessons which integrate teaching thinking skills into instruction--language arts, writing, science, math, social studies, personal problem solving, and enrichment. The central feature of all lessons is the use of graphic organizers to illustrate how information is related.

  Princeton Review: Study Smart: The Hands-On, Nuts and Bolts Techniques of Ear

  This guide will show students how to earn higher grades by studying smarter instead of just harder. Students will learn how to write essays and papers quickly and well, crucial critical reasoning skills. This book also has information on how to take tests.

  SAT Vocabulary Express: Word Puzzles Designed to Decode the New SAT

  This book by Jacqueline Byrne and Michael Ashley includes all kinds of puzzles: crosswords, anagrams, acrostics, cryptograms and more. In a crossword puzzle built around common SAT wrods, you must think of all the possible words for a definition or clue and try to come up with a word that will fit in the given blanks, rejecting the longer and shorter possibilities and homing in on the correct lenght answer.

  Teen Success! Jump Start Ideas to Move Your Mind

  Authors Beatrice Elyé and Catherine Southwick use a warm conversational style to help give your teenager the practical skills they need to succeed: time management, speed reading, communication and decision making.

  The Organized Student: Teaching Children the Skills for Success in School and Beyond

  The overstuffed backpack, the missing homework, the unused planner, the test he didn't know about. Sound familiar? When the disorganized child meets the departmentalized structure of middle school, everything can fall apart. This book contains hands-on strategies for teaching your disorganized child how to organize for success in middle school and high school, with special tips for kids with ADD/ADHD and learning disorders.

  The Smart Teens’ Guide to Living with Intensity

  This book by Lisa Rivero is written for pre-teens and teens who love to learn, although they might not love school. How these teens can understand their intensity, manage perfectionism and self-talk, understand their parents better, and take charge of their education are all covered topics. When these students open up the possibilities of how to learn both in and outside of school, they can live life more fully, intensely and creatively. This is an excellent companion book to A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Teens, written by the same author but for parents of gifted adolescents.
  

  What Do You Really Want?: How to Set a Goal and Go for It! A Guide for Teens

  Why do some people accomplish so much more than others? It’s not because they’re smarter or more talented. It’s because they know how to set and reach goals. Research shows that effective goal setters have less stress and anxiety, concentrate better, and are more satisfied with their lives. For teens, goal setting is linked to improved school performance, motivation, self-confidence, and self-esteem. What Do You Really Want? is a step-by-step guide to goal setting, written especially for teens.

• Summer Programs: National

  SuperCamp - Quantum Learning (Multiple Locations)

  SuperCamp provides three age/grade-specific learning and life skills summer camp programs, including academic summer camps for students entering grades 6-8 in the fall, teen summer camps for students starting grades 9-12 and college summer camps for incoming and current college students, Quantum U.

• Websites & Other Media: Apps

  Jing

  Jing is a free and simple way to share images and short videos with others. Whether for work, home or play, Jing gives users the ability to add basic visual elements to screen captures and share them fast. Users can capture an image of their computer screen to share and/or select a window or region of their screen to record. With Jing, users can send their screenshots and videos to anyone through IM, email, social media and more.

  Notability

  Notability is a note-taking app that allows the creation of categories and subjects that can be used like file folders. Within these folders, notes can be created by typing or using a stylus reflecting individualized handwriting. Work may be personalized through changes in fonts, colors, size and background color. Pictures, charts and graphs may be imported. Once complete, a note can be shared as a PDF by emailing it or adding it to Dropbox or Google Drive.

• Websites & Other Media: Commercial

  Kaplan Online Test Preparation Courses

  This distance learning program offers students help in preparing for a range of tests from elementary school through graduate school. Available online and as a CD-ROM curriculum, courses use sample tests and teach test-taking techniques for improving standardized test scores.

  STUDY tactics

  This site is for students interested positive study habits. It offers learning tools, test preparation information and career and college searches.

• Websites & Other Media: For Educators

  Smithsonian's History Explorer

  Smithsonian’s History Explorer provides hundreds of free online resources for teaching and learning American history. The site is designed for use by K-12 teachers and students, afterschool program providers and families. The website focuses on using historical artifacts and items to teach American history.

• Websites & Other Media: For Fun

  Jumpstart Typing

  You need to help save Coach Qwerty! Polly locked him up, and now it's up to you to type your fastest and most accurately to earn key-cards and save the day!

  Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 9

  Excellent resources for learning keyboarding. Includes games which are motivational, and progresses with the student's ability.

  NewzBrain Weekly

  NewzBrain Weekly is an interactive game board classroom enrichment assessment of current events, world, national and cultural. NewzBrain administers the National Weekly Online Quiz Bowl for High Ability Learners, which quizzes and teaches students in grades 3-12 students on core curriculum. The 10-minute weekly event allows students to play nationally and never leave the school site.

  Start with a Book

  To ward off the learning loss that many children experience over the summer, Start with a Book offers parents, caregivers, summer program staff and librarians lots of engaging ideas for getting kids hooked on reading, exploring and learning all summer long — and beyond.

  Whyville

  This is an interactive "live" website where users and guests create a drawing to represent themselves as they move around "Whyville." In Whyville, they interact with other participants, as they learn about science topics in an open-ended, exploratory way, invent things and have the ability to do hands-on activities at home and post their results on the site.

• Websites & Other Media: Informational

  BYTES Power Smarts

  This website provides free stories for children in grades 3-5 (ages 8-11), designed to help them recognize and appreciate their strengths and talents. Power Smarts are the 8 multiple intelligences identified by Harvard research psychologist Howard Gardner. Each story comes with optional discussion questions to spark conversations and develop face-to-face conversational skills.

  Course Notes

  This website provides free notes, outlines, study guides and practice exams for more than 19 subjects, including math, science, English, history, psychology, etc. It also offers an active discussion forum.

  Future Problem Solving Program International

  "Opening doors to student imaginations since 1974, the Future Problem Solving Program offers new and exciting learning paths. Discovering rich and varied ways of thinking, students experience the excitement of creative thinking and the thrill of resolving difficult problems with unique solutions when they participate in FPSP. Inspiring and motivating, our educational materials help your students learn how to think (not what to think)."
  

  Scholar Holler

  This website is designed to bring together some of the brightest young minds in the nation in an effort to mentor younger students. Members of the online community can receive advice on topics ranging from academics, scholarships, contests and more.

  Shmoop

  The Shmoop website offers free learning guides, online courses, college readiness prep, and test prep. The website also provides subscription-based test preparatory services and practice examinations. They also offer a Careers page and College 101 section. Thousands of schools around the world use Shmoop as part of their curriculum.

  Study Skills Self-Help Information

  This website from Virginia Tech University offers articles on topics to help improve study skills. More in-depth, online study skills workshops are also available on the following topics: Time Management Strategies for Improving Academic Performance; Seven Strategies for Improving Test Performance; Increasing Textbook Reading Comprehension by Using SQ3R; Strategies for Improving Concentration and Memory; and Study Skills Inventory.

• Websites & Other Media: Learning Tools

  How to Become a SuperStar Student

  This DVD instructs high school students to improve basic study skills and develop enthusiasm for learning. The course covers a range of skills useful in any school subject: budgeting time, taking notes, annotating texts, writing papers, completing exams and choosing the right path after high school.

  MIT-K12

  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created this project containing numerous videos full of educational content, driven by a series of questions: How can we change the perception of the role of engineers and scientists in the world? What can MIT do, right now, to improve STEM education at the K12 level? What if MIT became a publicly accessible “experiential partner” to the country’s K12 educators? What if MIT students generated short-form videos to complement the work those educators are already doing in their classrooms and homes? MIT seeks to illustrate that the best spokespeople in the battle to engage young people in science and engineering are other young people.

  SpellingCity.com

  SpellingCity is an online spelling program that makes practicing for spelling tests fun.

  Student Guide

  StudentGuide.org is a collection of useful resources for students to assist their scholastic goals. This website contains articles on hundreds of student-related topics to help them improve their study habits, writing skills, organizational and analytical skills.

  StudyStack

  This website is an excellent study guide for students. With numerous topics ranging from Geography to History to Science and more, students are provided a number of tools (such as flashcards, games, study tables, etc.) to assist them with their studies.

  Type to Learn®

  "Students embark on zany time travel missions to learn keyboarding skills in this animated update of Type to Learn™. Built on a proven curriculum of sequential, skills-building instruction, Type to Learn™ 3 helps students master keyboarding by engaging them in lesson/practice sequences."