Georgia O'Keeffe Poppies
- For many parents, homeschooling may be the only viable answer for their child's education. The experience of being a highly gifted learner in a regular classroom can be, as a wise person once remarked, like feeding an elephant one blade of grass at a time: The elephant will starve to death on a diet that was too slow and simply not enough.
Some parents "afterschool" their children as an alternative, providing enrichment, classes, tutors, or at-home education to supplement their child's learning and feed the mental machine. Here are some invaluable resources both for Nevadans and others to help homeschoolers of highly gifted kids.
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Homeschooling Forums and Groups
Tall Poppies Message Board Come and talk to us, share your stories, set up a class or a book group, and let us know about you and your child!
A statewide group that provides information and tons of helpful references for homeschooling parents throughout Nevada.
This is a great support group for homeschooling parents in northern Nevada.
Accelerated Learner Message Board A message board for parents of gifted children using classical education as their homeschooling approach. Hosted by the authors of The Well-trained Mind.
Unschooling.com's Message Boards Covers tons of information for people using the unschooling approach to teach their child. Very thorough.
Articles and Resources
Homeschooling Gifted Kids Part of the A to Z Home's Cool Homeschooling site, this helpful page provides articles AND a homeschooling message forum for California homeschoolers as well. Friendly and accessible.
This Hoagies resource contains everything from articles for new or still-deciding-about-it homeschoolers to personal accounts of being homeschooled and gifted. Resources abound, including links to helpful books available on Amazon.
Internet Homeschooling Resources Compiled by Kathy Kearney of the Hollingworth Center for Highly Gifted Children, this site offers legal resources, articles, and more with special focus on homeschooling highly gifted learners.
Curricula, Curricula, Curricula!
Due to the overwhelming amount of resource material available for the different core areas of study, curricula reviews (pro and con) will be discussed on separate pages. Click away!
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Here are some tried-and-true approaches with their accompanying pros and cons:
At one end of the continuum is the style known as "unschooling," or child-led learning. The term, invented by educator John Holt, is generally used to mean a homeschooling method in which the child directs his or her own education. In the unschooling method, the parent acts as a facilitator for the child's interests. For example, if the child is interested in Egypt the parent may take them to the library, museums, field trips, et cetera, and continue pursuing this interest for as long as the child wishes. Major writers include John Holt, Grace Llewellyn and others.
Many HG learners tend to be autodidactically inclined by nature and are good at defining their strengths and interests. Indeed, with some of them, the "rage to learn" characteristic of many HG and PG kids often leaves the parents with little other choice than to follow their child's intense passion. At stake for many parents is the philosophical consideration of basic respect for children and belief in the freedom to learn what you choose when you choose to learn it.
Parents may be concerned that their child will focus on one topic or a limited range of topics to the exclusion of other, equally important ones. Parental anxiety may be high if the child is later than the norm in deciding to learn certain fundamental skills such as mathematics or reading. A final concern may be that the learning is done with no necessary sequential connections between the things learned, with the result that big "gaps" may exist in the child's knowledge base.
Pretty much the complete opposite of unschooling, the classical education approach bases its structure on the classic model of education done in three stages from memorization of fundamental facts in the "grammar stage", to the understanding of how and why these facts came to operate in the "logic stage," and finally to the application and synthesis of the information in the highest, or "rhetoric" stage. Inspired by Dorothy Sayers' seminal essay "The Lost Tools of Learning" and spearheaded by the book The Well-trained Mind, classical education is attempting to restore education from what they see as a currently chaotic series of disconnected bits of information to a discipline that is both orderly and intellectually demanding.
The intellectual rigor and inherently disciplined, logical approach make classical education a solid choice for many HG learners. Introducing the classics to children at an early age and spiraling through history at greater levels of complexity and depth, the method ensures that a child will be genuinely well-educated in the most "culturally literate" sense of the word. This approach is particularly strong in history, which is used as the organizational "spine" to which everything else -- even mathematics and science -- is attached. This is a great method if your child wants to go to the University of Chicago, Shimer College,or St. John's College, all of which focus on the Great Books approach to curriculum.
The insistence on memorization, especially in the early years, may be too rigid and redundant an approach for some HG learners. The classical education approach tends to be somewhat weak on science as a general rule because its true heart lies in history and humanities. It allows for little innovation or divergence from the timeline of history unless the parent "bends the rules" and allows (for instance) their child to get into Pride and Prejudice even though they're still studying the Akkadians. If your child's interests are not in language or literature, this curriculum might go down with difficulty.
Unit study is one of the most common pedagogical techniques practiced in elementary schools: kids study one area intensively and everything (math, science, literature, etc.) relates to that one topic. For example, if one decides to do a unit on bats, a parent might read the Magic School Bus book and research guide on bats, go to a zoo or animal preserve to see bats, read information on the Internet about bats...you get the picture.
Unit study is very effective in communicating information in a variety of possible ways that appeal to a broad spectrum of learning styles: auditory learners can listen to stories on the unit theme, the visual learner can draw, and so on. The internal consistency and deep focus that unit study allows permits a subject to be explored in great detail while remaining flexible enough to be covered to the student's (and parent's) satisfaction. In some ways, unit studies and unschooling can have a great deal in common and be very good for a child intensely interested in a subject.
The accusation some critics, John Taylor Gatto in particular, level at the educational system is that it is chaotic and fragmentary, with little necessary connection between ideas or subjects. To an extent unit study ameliorates the problem but only within the unit itself. Unless the parent specifically works to ensure a logical progression from unit to unit (e.g., a temporal progress from the unit on Neanderthals to the unit on Cro-Magnons, for instance), the unit system risks being illogically connected (e.g., "Last week we did bats; this week, Egypt!") -- a chief problem with the way unit studies are implemented in the school systems.
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