This digest paper presents strategies and activities that can be used to encourage gifted students to develop their individual talents in the language arts. Suggestions for exploring poetic language especially free verse, include ideas for creating group poems and catalysts for creating individual poems. Suggestions for exploring the elements of fiction include encouraging divergent thinking about stories and using fairy tales with slightly altered characters to explore fiction. Suggestions for the study of biography and historical fiction address helping students research the facts and trying to describe an event from the perspective of various real or imaginary individuals. These types of activities are thought to develop creative writing, composing, and dramatizing skills as well as the higher level thinking skills of analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. (DB)