Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Home/ Unschooling advice, chat pls

I'd love to talk to any unschoolers or homeschoolers of gifted kids...

Aiden is only 5, and while the concept of unschooling greatly appeals to me, I have realised that he NEEDS daily mental stimulation like most people need daily oxygen.

So we started a slightly more structured day yesterday and today and things are HEAPS better.

I'd love to discuss this with someone who understands my need to fulfill:
a) the gifted issues
b) the unschooling ideas

anyone ?

Well, it sounds like you're responding to and trying to address your kids'
needs--how could anyone ask for more?
Homeschooling is not really an option for us due to DD8's (and my!)
disposition, and relative dispositions, but I'm glad to see it might work
for someone else.

Sorry I don't have anything more structured to say

Best wishes,
Dbat

We home schooled DD9 this last year, full time during the 1st semester and 1/2 time during the 2nd half of the year. (She went to gr 6 part time). It was really difficult for DH to get DD focused and work everyday. She didn't do well with un-schooling, but didn't do well with too much pushing either. I think they pretty much came to a compromise of having some hard work days and other days with more play/ non-traditional days where they went to the museum or park and learned stuff from there that didn't really follow a curriculum, but were interesting and fun.

We're not technically homeschooling, but my DD9 is doing "Camp of Mom" this summer, instead of day camp. She's been expressing interest in being homeschooled for a couple of years, so this is the dry run (and would count as HS days, should we decide that HSing is the best plan for the coming year).

I've always said that if we ever homeschooled, we'd have to unschool - that the combination of me, DD, and a formal curriculum would be a fiasco. In practice (and bear in mind that I have 9 days of practice, so am far from an expert here!), what's working for us is a fair amount of structure. I work up a menu of options, and DD picks what she wants to do each day from the list. Some things take less time than I'd planned (so I add more choices to the list), and some take more (so we don't finish the list in the week, and some items carry over).

We've got a book (with workbook) for science, and SOTW audiobooks for history, but the rest is sort of cobbled together from whatever either she or I express an interest in. We've tried a handful of online math options, but the cobbled-together Mom-math we're doing now is getting better results in actual understanding - in large part because I can fine-tune each lesson based on the prior one.

Yay!  Resolution!   Don't think you have to teach every subject every day, far from it, and don't think you have to finish a lesson plan to get something out of it and make progress.  If you work on addition for a week then don't get back to it for a month there will still be more addition to learn when you get back to it.  

I don't know if you can buy from amazon in Africa.  Look at great and popular nonfiction books or high quality books.  Look through the reviews, especially the one and two star reviews and if some says something valid and recommends another book, look at that one before you make a choice.  Look at books in the young adult range because you're looking for stuff for the kids to grow into.  You'll only  want to keep it if you yourself enjoyed reading it.  I only have two bookshelves.  (and I store board games & science projects there too).   Storage space is precious and valuable when you're making a book collection just to be used in a few years from now.  

A lot of skills you can learn how to teach browsing forums and YouTube and then just talk about it, show them with a pencil and paper, or show them the videos on you tube that explain them.  I hardly have curriculum on my bookshelf.  I have a few workbooks (we were doing handwriting w/o tears 2nd grade, kumon telling time, one page a day.  Then we were tracing American maps from one nation fifty states, one a day.  Now we're visiting family. 

I have a microscope and slides and a chemistry set that's just for pouring water back and forth for now and a box full of electronic science stuff, all collections i'm building for my kids to grow into but I let my son play make believe with it now under supervision.

A whiteboard and a bulk supply of dry erase markers is the most used item in the house. By the kids more than me.  Supervise the return of the markers when finished.  

We weren't homeschooling or unschooling we were pre-schooling.  He'll start going to school in August.  They say unschooling is just parenting like you would in the afterschool hours.  Since I plan on afterschooling, continuing lessons like we have been around school hours, then for us homeschooling was apparently unschooling.  LoL <>

Check out these videos on YouTube:
Singapore Math (Grade 2A, Unit 1): Tens and Ones



Division 1



I Can Count to 100 (counting song for kids by Mark D. Pencil)



School House Rock - Counting by Fives



3 TIMES TABLE MULTIPLICATION SONG - FROM "THE NUMBEARS MULTIPLY!" CD BY PHIL SNYDER



La Gran Fiesta de Pocoyó PARTE 2/5



Chinese Pinyin in 6 Mins

thank you everyone for the comments and suggestions and help and cheerleading!

Solaris - I will definitely PM you it will be lovely to chat to someone who is "ahead" of us! I don't intend to buy an out-of-the-box curriculum, but am rather trying to find specifics at our level, so we have a maths set that goes through 8th grade and I am creating my own handwriting tools and we use our own reading books etc. I want to find something for history and use projects for geography, that sort of thing.

Alex'sMom - I love that we dont have to rush anything kwim? we can stay in PJ's if we want, we can sleep in late if we want... we are trying out the structure now, so will try stick to it more for at least 3 weeks to get everyone into the regular routine, and will soften it from there to the desired level. This was a suggestion by a Home schooling mom of 8 kids, so it's worth a try I recon.

LaTex - yes we have de-schooled for nearly 3 months and this week Aiden begged for real learning stuff. So we started with some 3rd grade maths workbook and then moved on to using maths to prepare for home projects. Today he worked out how many mosaic tiles of a certain size we will need for two planters by the pool. Then we got to the store and he changed the design totally based on some gorgeous ones we saw on sale. lol.

Thanks for the links - I have bookmarked them and will use them as we need them

Medium kid is at home for winter break now and has joined is happily this week, I want to see if i can manage both at once and then use that to tempt DH to bring him home too after the 3rd school term.

I am trying to justify an interactive whiteboard as something they will all use for the rest of their kid lives and I get books from the publishers for my business, so they each now have a quarterly book allowance, and they love to browse the catalogues and choose their books. We have too many books, but as Baby boy outgrows them we will donate to rural schools for libraries etc. I love books - although there are some collections I want to get as they will last us years still.

The thing about homeschooling/unschooling gifted kids is that their needs change quite frequently. I know this is true for all kids, but for gifted kids who are interested in EVERYTHING it's important to feed those fires when they begin to burn.

I have heard the term "tidal schooling" which pretty much sums up what we do. Sometimes we use parts of a bought curriculum, sometimes we don't. It's all a matter of feeling your way through and being mindful of meeting your child's needs.

Many people think that the word unschooling is synonymous with lazy parenting but that is really quite the opposite. Unschooling parents have to notice and pay attention much more than they would if they were following a set schedule written by whatever curriculum company they happen to be using at the time kwim?

Have you read anything by David Albert? I think you'd really enjoy his books.

I think what we did before my son started kindergarten could be considered unschooling. My son wanted to read a lot of different things--science encyclopedias, how it works books, National Geographic magazines, dictionaries, etc. I just made sure he had books he was interested in and took the time to continue reading with him. I didn't make him read what I liked or what the school would have made him read. I let him do musical theater so he was with kids up to high school age so he could have friends with common interests that were three and four years older.

At five my son was in half-day kindergarten and since he was already reading at a 5th grade level and they were doing letter of the week and lots of coloring we continued to unschool.

We unschooled almost everything except math. I had to make him do a minimum amount of math because he has dysgraphia and he hated writing out math problems. I ended up letting him play online math games when he was six at when he was tested by an educational psychologist the month he turned seven he was at a 4th grade level. His reading and comprehension were always at a higher level than math. Unschooling definitely worked for him.

He took one co-op class for composition and literature his 7th grade year and he had learned enough on his own that it was easy for him. He made a 98 for the year and he could write really well. He would not have written a poem if he hadn't taken this class and he found that he was good at that also. This year I didn't make him do any writing but he entered some contest online and won a game for something he wrote.

I never had to teach him to spell. He did a spelling bee one year and competed at the state level. Because he was unschooling he had plenty of time to practice.

He taught me more than I taught him. I think he must think I have learning difficulties because I am technologically challenged and he learns things so easily but he is very patient with me and his older sister and I can see that he would make a good teacher. He has an geology professor aunt on his dad's side and one of my uncles taught engineering so there are educators in the family but I wonder about this. How would someone who is unschooled learn to manage a classroom?

Now that he would be going into 9th grade and I think we need to be more structured and I am having a panic attack thinking about it.

Lori thank you for sharing that with me! That is kind of what I envision for us, except we are helping Aiden heal right now, and helping him find his feet again first. A

Personally I think that an unschooler would manage a classroom brilliantly simply because he KNOWS how to think outside the box. I recon he would be a most popular teacher because he would most likely approach his students in the way that makes sense to him; more facilitating than teaching, more nurturing than lecturing.

I think you should just carry on as you are; when he is ready to decide on his future I am sure that he will have no problems fulfilling any formal criteria he would then need