Adapting Curriculum for Your Homeschooler

This article originally appeared in Understanding Our Gifted as “Adapting Curriculum for Gifted Learners.” Although it was written with an eye toward children who are advanced in a subject, the advice can apply in many situations, as many homeschoolers need some variation from straight-from-the-box curriculum. The article is based on an excerpt from my book, From School to Homeschool.

When I started homeschooling, I would listen jealously as other parents discussed curriculum for reading and math, two subjects that my daughter never needed any instruction in as a young child. I was eager to try out curriculum, much of which seemed quite fun, but my visual spatial daughter wasn’t quite ready for learning on paper.

Once I thought she was ready, I found out that searching for the right curriculum was not exactly the fun job I thought it would be. Everything I tried seemed to have major flaws. I realized that because curriculum has to be written for some fictional “average” child, even curriculum written “for gifted children” is unlikely to fit my children like a glove.

Through some experimentation, I found that the really major problems are easy to fix:Curriculum

The curriculum asks the same sorts of questions over and over:

Whereas the average-ability child needs repetition in order to learn, this is not necessarily true of your gifted learner. If the math curriculum you’ve chosen has 20 questions when your child only needs four, cross out the other 16! This is a good lesson for your child to learn as well: When you’re done learning, there is no reason to sit there and bore yourself until you don’t enjoy it anymore.

Example: My nine-year-old has been enjoying the Key Curriculum Press mathematics workbook series. She loves that everything she needs is in the book, and she doesn’t depend on me too much. However, these books contain entire pages of repetitious practice problems. I noticed that when my daughter turned to one of these pages, she would scribble in the book in frustration. Now I go through and mark a small selection of problems on each page and tell her she doesn’t have to do any of the others unless she wants to.

The curriculum proceeds at a snail’s pace through material that my child gets immediately:

In this case, you probably need to find new curriculum. Again, the fact that some children need more practice in certain areas doesn’t mean that your child should have to suffer through unnecessary repetition.

Example: My son loves computer programming, but everything that we found for children went so slowly and was so superficial he couldn’t get interested. So we jumped into a combination of adult–level online classes and self–initiated projects.

The curriculum sparked my child’s interest but didn’t go deep enough:

This is where the Internet and your public library come in. A great curriculum will include resources to expand into, but even if it doesn’t, you can take the initiative to find more.

Example: Pretty much every curriculum I have used, with a few exceptions, suffers from this problem. Especially print curriculum can’t offer links to the rich, infinite library we now all have available to us on the Internet. Also, my very hands–on daughter always requires a more project–based approach, so I just use the curriculum as a guide and we devise our own projects to go with it. At this point, I consider curriculum to be the starting off point, not the end product.

Sometimes the problems with curriculum are more complex and necessitate changes in how we homeschool. These problems might include:

My child seems to hate every curriculum in this subject, even though he’s good at it:

Children often resist curriculum in their strongest subjects simply because they are beyond it. This is a time to trust your child’s instinct and look for something different. If you have a strong, independent learner (an unschooler, in other words), just be there as backup to provide what he needs. If not, you might have to devise a curriculum on the fly or find a suitable tutor who can go at your child’s pace.

Example: My son really hates having to write the standard middle school essays that most middle school curriculum would recommend. The thing is, he’s a fine writer and skipping a year or two of these essays isn’t going to mean that he won’t get into college. For now, I just let him do the writing that he enjoys, such as software reviews on his blog.

My child is ready to learn at a college level (input) but can’t do the writing or problem solving (output) on her own:

Again, this is pretty common. Gifted students are often advanced in their analytical skills but behind in skills they need for output, such as writing, organizing ideas, computation, and working through multi-level problems without support. Homeschooling parents have to accept this disparity in their children’s skills and provide support as needed. A child who can’t write college-level papers has no business going to a college-level literature course at the community college, but there’s no reason why you can’t use college-level curriculum at home and do the output part of it verbally.

Example: My daughter is highly verbal, but starting from the age when schools would have expected her to hand write her work, she started to say that she didn’t like to write. Her difficulties with fine motor control and her frustration with the slow speed of her hands not keeping up with fast speed of her thoughts had resulted in frustration. Instead of forcing her, I let her dictate everything while I typed. She worked independently on her handwriting, but I didn’t try to force her to work on her handwriting while also trying to get her ideas out. The result was a child who loved writing to the point where she started to publish a newspaper that she designed and wrote. I did the typing, and that freed her to do her best on the rest of it.

My child consistently wants to do easier work than I know he’s capable of:

Our children may be gifted, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t children and that they don’t have their own preferences. Some children are simply not going to be those high–achieving prodigies you read about. A sensitive parent sometimes has to follow her child’s lead, even when she knows that the potential is there. Skilled homeschoolers develop a sense of when to push and when to be more flexible.

Example: My daughter spent her first few reading years, after she’d tested at a sixth-grade reading level, reading Captain Underpants and Magic Treehouse. I resisted the temptation to make an issue of it, and now at nine years old she’s reading well past her grade level.

It’s not unusual to be frustrated that your child can’t “perform” as you expect him to. School-based assumptions have trained us that “smart” children do well in school. But you’ve given up on school (for now), and you need to adopt a new mindset. You are trying to create an environment in which your student excels. Curriculum, therefore, must bend with your student’s needs.

One more thing that is really important to note is that school—and a lot of curriculum—focuses on documentation. Over the course of the school year, your child will produce piles of papers: worksheets, diagrams, graphs, drawings. Most parents don’t realize that this output does not document learning—it documents work. School teachers require output in order to prove that their students are working. In a homeschool, you know your child is learning. You don’t need to produce a piece of paper every time your child watches a history video, for example, or does a science experiment. If you try to force a gifted child into too much busywork for the purposes of documentation, you’re going to have an unhappy homeschooler.

You should always be willing to bend curriculum to work for you and your child’s needs. A completed curriculum booklet doesn’t prove that your child has learned anything. However, a happy, engaged child does prove that your homeschool is on the right track.

Hurrah! for a well-earned week

In homeschooling circles, what I’m about to confess is something on a par with admitting that you are some sort of non-violent felon. Not as bad as a murderer, though perhaps I’d be put in a category with embezzling CEOs, crooked car mechanics, and guys that steal purses from old ladies.

OK, deep breath, here it goes: I confess that I don’t always want to be with my children.

Camp
Not my daughter’s camp, but I couldn’t resist including a photo of Icelandic ponies!

Phew, that was rough, but I’m glad I got it off my chest. When I walk into the homeschooling conference in a little over a week, the crowd may actually part so that no one has direct contact with me. It’s possible that I’ll be kicked off the board of the Discovery Learning Center and my children will be shunned at homeschool park days.

But at least I will feel unburdened. It’s just a risk I have to take.

It’s like this: I adore my kids. I think they’re really cool. In fact, like most parents, I think they’re cooler than any other kids, at least as far as my own personal definition of “cool” goes.

My kids have improved my life in many ways. They got me into thinking about parenting, then education, then homeschooling, then gifted children—in other words, pretty much everything I write about these days. They have made me laugh harder than any other person was ever able to.

They have also made me cry. Parenting is hard, and parenting children off the usual grid is even harder.

These days I don’t cry so much, but I do get frustrated. Days pile on days of aggravation and difficulty, and it can be hard to remember the time my kids made me laugh harder than I’ve ever laughed before. I get grumpy. I say things I shouldn’t say. We do eventually kiss and make up, but life without a break from parenting is just not something that works for me.

I bow down and ask forgiveness of all of you who want to be with your children 24/7, but that’s not me. First off, I want my kids to go to bed so that their father and I can talk to each other. Yeah, it’s true, we might only talk about taxes or Star Trek The Next Generation, but we’re talking TO each other and not past, around, or in spite of any other being.

Secondly, though I love homeschooling my kids, I do want them to learn from other adults. I know that I can’t be their everything. I know that the thing that ends up inspiring them, exciting them to the point that they want to spend their life doing it, may be something that I know nothing about. Heck, it might not even be invented yet.

Finally, and here’s where I really get to the fine point, I love, love, love sleepaway camp. Sleepaway camp has not always been part of our summers. Our son is willing to go camping with other families, and does on occasion, but sleepaway camp is definitely not his thing. But last summer our daughter decided that she simply had to go to a sleepaway horse camp, and begged me to find one.

I’ll admit I was skeptical. First off, I was skeptical I could find one where she would do well, where I wouldn’t get that mid-week call, “So, about your daughter, she’s been having a hard week…” You know, the things professionals say instead of what they want to say, which is something like, “Save us from this kid!”

Secondly, I was skeptical that we could afford such a thing. Is it really worth that much to get rid of your kid for a week?

The answer is unequivocally YES on both counts. We found a camp that not only has wall-to-wall horse riding, but has counselors trained to work with kids with all sorts of special needs. Our daughter is fine there. She loves it, and they don’t have any problem with her eccentricities (or if they do, I don’t hear about it).

We have also found that it is worth the money, whether or not we have to mortgage the farm to get it. A week away from each other resets all of our engines. It gives her time to get away from the three Most Annoying People in the Universe. (Those are not just honorary titles—I have it on good authority that we really are the Most Annoying People in the Universe!) It gives us time to have conversations with our son that would annoy her to no end.

So in other words, a week to reset all our panic buttons is well worth the investment. It’s true, I miss her. I miss her cuddles, because despite sometimes having a prickly personality, she is The World’s Most Cuddly Person. (I am the official giver of that title.) I miss her commiseration when her brother and father go deep into geek talk at the dinner table. I miss her hurricane, the energy that moves through the house and upsets all our expectations.

But this is good for all of us. We all benefit from the downtime so that we can meet the challenge of the coming year with good cheer, remembering what we love about each other in the midst of everything that will try our patience and make us wonder how we can possibly go on.

So despite the risk to my homeschool reputation, here are my three hearty cheers for summer camp.

Hooray! Hooray! Hurrah for our well-earned week apart!

Learn Nothing Day!

I’m writing this on July 23, but I’m guessing that on July 24, I will fail again. How? Well, July 24 is

Learn Nothing Day!

Yep, that’s right. School children get a break all summer. They don’t have to go to school. But homeschoolers? What a drag. We learn every day. Never a break. Well, leave it to Sandra to give us a vacation of our own.

Problem is, I’m already anticipating our failure. I’m wondering how I’m going to keep from learning anything, and keep my kids from learning, too.

What a huge job homeschooling is. I think I’ll just send them back to school so they can have 10 weeks off from learning. It’s so much easier…

Book review: Searching for Meaning

Searching for Meaning: Idealism, Bright Minds, Disillusionment, and Hope
by James T. Webb
Great Potential Press

Searching for MeaningDr. Webb’s work has been very important in my life. The day I picked up A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children is the day that I started to learn about my children—and myself. This was the first parenting book I’d read that admitted that children are different, that families are different, and that it’s not only OK to be different—it’s OK to acknowledge that you are different. And it’s not only OK, but also necessary, to know who you and your children are if you are going to get on with the business of living fulfilling lives.

Dr. Webb’s work with gifted children necessarily led him to the next step: what happens when gifted children grow up? In common belief, giftedness = high achievement. So a gifted child is only gifted by virtue of his or her high grades, and once school is over, somehow we all become “the same.” Yes, some of us as adults are achievers, but it doesn’t matter whether we were whiz kids in school or dropouts who made it big later in life—giftedness is not supposed to matter anymore.

What Dr. Webb has noticed, however, is that the brain that makes gifted children more excitable, more prone to being misdiagnosed with disorders, highly sensitive, and socially unusual does not disappear with adulthood. It’s that same brain, but more developed, more in control. The girl that screamed when she went into a room with bright lights becomes the woman who wears tinted glasses and has found a way to avoid working in office buildings. The boy who kept being sent to the principal’s office because he couldn’t sit still when he was excited about what he was learning has become the man who paces his office and talks to himself when he’s solving a difficult problem. We didn’t suddenly stop having a different brain because we grew up; we simply learned to shape a world that fit our needs.

But that ability to shape the world has its limits. Yes, the woman who is sensitive to light can wear tinted glasses, but if she’s sensitive to violence it’s hard for her to avoid knowing about the violence in this world. The man who paces his office has control of his part of the project he’s working on, but he doesn’t have control over the exploitation of the workers who make the computers he programs. We figure out a way to cope, but sometimes coping is not enough. When you have a brain that works on overdrive, it’s not easy to turn it off at your convenience.

Searching for Meaning is not an easy book. I have to admit, it’s not a book I would have picked up while browsing in a book store. Disillusionment? Hm, maybe I should go for something lighter. Existential depression? Gotta go, I’m late for an appointment. Admitting that what made me a “smart kid” is still intrinsically part of how I interact with the world? Not likely. But despite the fact that I would have avoided this book—perhaps because I would have avoided it—I really appreciate having read it through to the end.

The book takes an analytical approach to the problem by first dissecting it. What is a gifted child? What is a gifted adult? Webb devotes ample space to questioning what makes us who we are. He then lays out the base that the rest of the book builds on: Our overexcitabilities lead us to be idealists; our idealism leads us to want to change the world; our attempts to make things better will eventually lead us to realize that there are limits to what we can do; facing our limits can sometimes lead us to question what our lives are worth.

Dr. Webb could have made this a gloomy book, indeed. However, by laying the foundation of why so many bright minds find themselves confronting disillusionment and depression, he is then able to build on this understanding to help us climb back into the light. Using the different points of view of a variety of thinkers through the ages, Dr. Webb shows ways that we can view what we’re experiencing through a new lens. He offers new ways of looking at what might seem to be a bleak landscape, and cautions us against coping mechanisms (anger, narcissism, avoidance) that become destructive even as we think we are protecting ourselves.

Finally, Dr. Webb offers us the challenge to view our idealism and sensitivity as an asset, to find coping mechanisms that improve our lives and the lives of others, and to aim for hope, happiness, and contentment in a world that desperately needs more of all three.

If you think it’s uncomfortable admitting that your child is different and has different needs, magnify that 20-fold to admit that about your adult self. Dr. Webb’s current mission is to remind us that our brains — no matter which type we ended up with — still need TLC once we move into our adult lives. Dr. Webb’s mission is to understand the needs of brains we called “gifted,” but this book takes its place in a greater striving to understand all different aspects of humanity now that we have the tools to do so.

We are all different. We do have our own needs. Dr. Webb’s brave book encourages one segment of “special needs adults” to learn more about caring for their singularly overexcitable brains.

My homeschool prodigy

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this.

I’ve been holding something back. It’s just, well, difficult to acknowledge this and feel certain that people won’t think I’m bragging. I mean, it’s one thing to homeschool your children. You already look like Superwoman to all those women out there who have real jobs and get paid and can afford to go out to lunch. They hear that you’re still wearing your pajamas at 10 a.m. and they are so envious that it’s hard for them to be nice to you anymore. And when they find out that you actually get your laundry done occasionally? Then the real jealousy sets in.

But on top of that, when you admit that you have a supergenius prodigy in your household? That you’re the mother of a homeschooling phenom? Well, that can be hard to admit. It’s a show-stopper, like telling a working mom that instead of taking the time to make your own lunch, you just eat the crumbs and slimy bits off your kids’ plates. I mean, you have to be careful not to make your friends too jealous, you know?

But I just can’t hold it in anymore. I am so proud of my little boy, the one I call my little bandit. He’s amazing! He talks, he does math, he steals things, and he proves over and over that he is much smarter than his older brother, who is six.

And here’s the kicker: he’s only two.

Oh, and he’s also my most handsome child. Here is a recent photo:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

I’m sure you can just see the intelligence pouring forth: the distinguished brow, the alert ears, the apathetic expression.

He’s seen it all. You can’t fool this boy.

So perhaps you think I’m exaggerating. He can’t be all that smart. Well, let me tell you a few things:

Most two-year-olds have a limited vocabulary. They get what they want by throwing fits and grabbing.

This child has never, ever grabbed something or thrown a fit. He is a perfect gentleman. He speaks in complete sentences. Now, it’s true that most of his sentences contain only one word, but that’s because he’s a master of brevity. He always gets straight to the point.

Most two-year-olds don’t even know what heat registers are. They walk right by them without a notice.

Look at my brilliant young man. He’s not just sitting on the heat register: he’s guarding it. He knows a secret that even most adults haven’t yet figured out: If you sit by a heat register long enough, occasionally a tasty fish pops out!

Not only that, but he knows how to open up registers. People deny that a two-year-old could do such a thing, so he finds it necessary to prove his abilities over and over. He opens every register in the house and leaves them for us to find, just to remind us of his brilliance.

Another piece of evidence that he is the most intellectually advanced two-year-old on the planet:

He steals reading glasses.

You probably find that ridiculous. Of course he doesn’t steal reading glasses – he can’t know how to read yet! But he does. I bought a four-pack of reading glasses from Costco, and I’m down to one pair. My prodigy has been taking them and hiding them in his secret fort, where he also takes the books that he reads them with. We haven’t figured out which books those are, but we’ll keep looking and I’ll start his reading list on Goodreads soon.

OK, one final proof of his brilliance: do you know any other two-year-olds who can do such insightful self-portraits as this?

catcake.jpg1

 

Imagine the mind that can produce such an image, and in the medium of cake and frosting, no less! He’s a born master of modern art. I’m sure he’s ready to start selling in galleries, if we could only figure out how to preserve his creations so that they wouldn’t get eaten.

So there you have it. My secret is out. I know you’re probably raging with jealousy at this point. You’re going to call me all sorts of nasty names online, and write scathing notes on your friends’ Facebook pages. But I just felt that it was unfair to my precious darling to hide him from the world any longer.

He is a homeschool prodigy, and I am his mother.

I feel so fulfilled, I think I will go eat some chocolate. And then I’ve got to take some time for phone calls. CNN and the Huffington Post will want to know about this, for sure.

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