Vol IV, No 7 - July 26, 2022 |
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My friends, it is the height of summer and I'm starting to hear of Back to School sightings out there. This...this is not okay! We still have s'mores to scarf, lightning bugs to chase, long novels to devour, naps to take under trees. There is still an awful lot of summer left! And yet? There's something refreshing about a new school year. A reset of sorts. Kids grow and mature and change over the summer months. Mine have grown and matured and changed so much over so many summers that this is the first year I won't have any back to schoolers here at home. They'll have to take their own First Day of School photos at college and text them to me. Will they? Probably not, and lo my maternal heart breaks.
Like the memory of childbirth, the hardest parts of homeschooling fade with time and so the happiest bits are more easily recalled. Homeschooling was one of the hardest things I've ever done and absolutely worth it. I remember the long treks to coop and how those special Fridays were when we could both be with our gifted peoples. That time I created a multiplication chart on a whiteboard so he could shoot the correct answer with a Nerf suction dart. And how homeschooling gave him the time and bandwidth to deep dive into his passion, computer networking and programming.
This month's featured post is one I wrote nine years ago, just a year and a half into our homeschool journey. The excerpt below is of the nine things I loved about homeschooling, but you'll have to click through to the full post to see the four things I despised.
Go enjoy some high summer, my friends. And a s'mores tip for you: peanut butter cups instead of chocolate bars. You can thank me later.
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Jen Merrill is a writer, musician, teacher, ed-tech marketing advisor, and gifted-family advocate. The mom of two boys, she homeschooled one twice-exceptional son through high school while happily sending the other out the door every morning. Her book, If This is a Gift, Can I Send It Back?, struck a nerve with families; her second book, on the needs of gifted parents and self-care, will be finished shortly before the heat death of the universe. In addition to writing on her longtime blog, Laughing at Chaos (currently on hiatus, returning this summer refreshed and relaxed), Jen has presented at SENG, NAGC, and WCGTC.
Jen brings both her acquired wisdom and her experience as a teacher and mentor to her work in the service of parents, teaching them techniques and mentoring them into their own versions of success. Her goal is to support parents of gifted and twice-exceptional kids, because they are the ones doing the heavy lifting and are too often ignored, patronized, and discredited. It is her hope that her sons never have to deal with these issues when they raise their own likely gifted children.
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GHF Conversations: Creating Your Gifted School Year |
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Jamie Heston of Jamie Heston Homeschool Consulting and Dr. MaryGrace Stewart, founder of IDEAL4Gifted will lead us in a half-day of conversations on planning your gifted school year. This event is FREE. Join us on August 20th.
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Things I Love About Homeschool
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Nine Things I Love About Homeschool...
by Jen Merrill
- No more homework battles. This alone makes homeschooling worthwhile for our twice-exceptional son. After a full day holding his shit together in the classroom he just didn’t have anything left for homework. The speed at which traditional school moves (new class with a new teacher and new expectations every 40 minutes), plus the sensory overload (23-30 kids packed into a classroom with buzzing lights), plus always feeling like he wasn’t good enough (couldn’t write fast enough, needed more time to think deeply and make connections, the class repeating repeating repeating lessons he’d already learned)…was it any wonder he’d come home completely spent? Homework that should have taken no more than 30 minutes was taking nearly four hours, simply because he had nothing left to give. Wasn’t worth it, to him or to me.
- I’m no longer fighting the school’s battles for them. See above about homework. But I also got really tired of telling A, “Sweetie, put that away. You don’t have time to learn about that because you have homework sitting here.” That was anything from programming to exoplanets. Now I just weave interests into the curriculum. It doesn’t have to be a long-term study, either. A couple weeks ago he had the opportunity to visit the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nuclear Science program through Boy Scouts. There was pre-event homework. He whipped through that (98% dudes–impressed the grad students) and dove a little deeper into the life of Marie Curie. We got behind a few days in geography, but in a school setting that would have chucked the whole house of cards into the bin.
- It’s the ultimate in block scheduling. A works best having large chunks of time in which to work. He sat and read the entire semester’s worth of mythology in a couple days. O-kay then. I’ll assign a couple units of math, he’ll do a full chapter. He needs more time to think and dive deep. I need to remember this.
- My son has true peers for the first time. Granted, he only sees them once a week during co-op (and this breaks my heart more than he realizes), but with Skype and Google Hangouts and online games he’s able to talk with them. He’s building relationships, and as I sometimes think he flirts with Aspergers, that is so good to see. And these are good, good kids.
- Anything and everything is a lesson. We listen to science and tech podcasts in the car. More often than not a topic leads to deeper investigation.
- Pacing is all his. I try, oh how I try, to schedule out the year/month/week/day. As time goes on it’s less and less a plan and more and more a suggestion. My Type A no likey. So I do the planning but he picks the pace. Last year he did a semester of computer science mathematics and still managed to complete 6th grade math in four months. This year? Math is moving more slowly, but he’s whipping through mythology, logic, and genetics.
- Pants optional. I’ll raise a fuss if we’re going somewhere, or if I think pj bottoms are making his brain lazy and sluggish, but we have no dress code.
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I have the time and space to scaffold
the crappy exceptionality the executive function skills that need help. They are very very slowly getting marginally better. Dear god I wish they’d get better faster; I’m sick to death of constantly building scaffolding.
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Our relationship is so much better now. He is more affectionate, I’m no longer bitter about the education system
much. Now that we’re working together instead of as adversaries, we like each other more. Given how much we butt heads on a daily basis, this is a good thing.
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Our friends at OnlineG3 have an amazing Fall line-up. Courses start Aug 15th. Registration is open now! Click here to peruse the course offerings.
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GHF’s newest release is, unbelievably, the first mainstream book written on the subject of being female and gifted! Co-written with her mother, the beloved Christine Winterbrook, Ed.D., Abby Noel Winterbrook’s Gifted Women: On Becoming Ourselves is an exploration of the development, characteristics, and a variety of other factors relevant to gifted women throughout their lifespan – cultural and societal pulls and biases, internal conflicts, how to thrive with and despite others’ perceptions, and more importantly, one’s own. Not a woman? Chances are you have some in your life - see how the other half lives! Abby also presented at our Gifted Home Ed conference earlier this month, and the video recordings are available to GHF Choices members.
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A Supportive Community for Gifted Learners |
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Come join us in the GHF Forum, our new online community where GHF will be sharing all of our services and resources. |
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FREE ACCESS to:
- Discussion groups
- Parenting Gifted
- Professionals
- Parenting 2e
- Homeschoolers
- Live Gifted Home Ed Conference
- Live Quarterly GHF Conversations Mini-Cons
- Live Monthly GHF Expert Series
UPGRADE to GHF Choices Membership:
- GHF Choices: DIY Education
- GHF Expert Series Library
- GHF Member Discounts
- Forever Access to Gifted Home Ed Conference & Conversations Recordings
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For those of you who can give at least $500 we have created a special recognition program where you will be listed on the GHF website and in our monthly newsletter, The GHF Journey, as valued members of the community. Donations may be kept anonymous.
- Tricia Delles, CPA
- Catherine Gruener, M.A., M.A., LCPC, LCMHC, NCC, BC-TMH, Gruener Consulting LLC
- Rosemary Guillette
- Kelly Hayes, Wonder Homeschool Center
- Dr. Melanie Hayes, Big Minds Unschool
- Heidi Molbak, Seed Starter Educational Consulting
- Dan Peters, Summit Center
- Magalie Pinney, State Street’s Do More Grant
- Deborah Reber, Tilt Parenting
- Elizabeth Ringlee, The Champion Project
- Jade Ann Rivera, Sunnyside Micro-School
- Lin Lim-Goh, The Quark Collaboration
- Debbie Steinberg-Kuntz, Bright and Quirky
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MISSION
To empower every gifted family to make strategic, proactive, and intentional educational choices.
VISION
A diverse world of multi-generational families, educators, and professionals supporting each other through community, education, and creating content relating to gifted home education.
#GIFTEDHOMEED
Empowering gifted families to make strategic, proactive, and intentional educational choices.
VALUES
GHF values the uniqueness and humanity of each person in our community. We treat each other with love and kindness and particularly abhor bullying and negativity of any kind. We accept that it is our job to examine each day with a fresh perspective and continue to improve the organization to pursue our mission.
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GHF is a 501c3 organization. Please consider supporting our community with your most generous gift today. For more information on our organization, please feel free to contact us. Thank you!
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