Feed Their Minds

Feed Their Minds is a project aimed at creating tangible support for children and kids who have high intellectual potential.

The know-how of teachers and parents of super-gifted kids, combined with the experience of identifying and mentoring artistic talent in adults, led us to consider how the identification and support for gifted children and kids is lacking substantially in Italian schools. In fact, besides displaying outstanding learning abilities, these students often also manifest problems in adapting to the proposed teaching methods, emotional pressure felt from the rest of the class, and traditional teaching strategies (oral exams and written tests). These problems can result in a variety of emotional and psychosomatic disorders, and manifest in various ways, from maladjustment to quitting school.

The school system does not seem to have tools that can nourish their minds and support their emotional distress, yet strategies which may prove to be quite effective can be applied.

Our project is to create practical intervention tools which support learning. We believe that these kids must first of all be motivated through diversified learning systems which enhance their qualities, in order to create a “virtuous circle” of self-esteem. This would have positive repercussions on their emotional fragility, as well.

We believe that our support is necessary, because when students are “diagnosed with intelligence” this often tends to create panic in the school environment. This is because while there may be an ability to understand the need to help students who have a disadvantage in learning, it is less understood why we need to also help those who appear to be “advantaged” in a variety of ways.

Our business project aims to satisfy this need and fill this gap, in which children and kids with high intellectual potential are left “alone”, especially at school. The idea is to serve families and public and private schools by creating guidelines – according to the MIUR guidelines - which can be used to make personalized learning plans for these kids, who fully fall under the Special Needs Education umbrella.

Our experience has led us to consider that there’s a need for creating the foundations for self-esteem in SNE subjects, and so first and foremost we need to enhance their abilities, and recognize their “diversity” as something worthy. We must avoid lowering standards in classes, and use the presence of the gifted to create a process of excellence. This is why, rather than proposing external workshops, we propose a service for creating study plans, offering counseling and support for families, and mentoring for these kids in and outside of school.

Through our contacts with Italian and foreign universities and associations that are already doing similar work, we would like to create some simple, preliminary tests to give to the greatest number of school students as possible. These tests are not just in mathematics but also in literature and linguistics, in order to observe as many areas of competency as possible.