He has very little interest in classical school subjects such as spelling, reading, mathematics and foreign languages. When you insist that he makes an effort, he is extremely strong in mathematics and he also reads really well. But he could never dream of touching his schoolbooks in his spare time, or asking for more or more difficult homework.
After all, there is a consensus that gifted children must be held to the fire and learn to make an effort and that they benefit from accelerated education. But how do you do that in an appropriate way when the child clearly prefers play, creativity and inventions to classical teaching? How do you teach the child to make an effort without the child losing his creative and imaginative abilities? We have often considered hiring a private tutor who could teach him, for example, mathematics at a higher and far more specialized level than what takes place at school, but this does not immediately feel like the right solution for him - there is a great risk that he will see it as a kind of punishment rather than a "gift". Should we completely forget about the classical education and just let him cultivate his creative abilities?
The school maths curriculum is designed so that formal progression successively builds solid foundations for the next set of concepts, but it’s difficult for young students to see the point of learning some of these abstract concepts and rules. He might be more stimulated by a problem/puzzle based approach.
Here are some websites with free puzzles with solutions:
https://www.mathsisfun.com/puzzles/https://www.thinkwellhomeschool.com/pages/free-math-puzzleshttps://mathforlove.com/puzzles/I’ve previewed them for you. I’m not sure where he is at in his learning journey, so they cover a range of different levels of understanding for different areas of maths. Hope he enjoys some of them.
He is extremely curious and asks questions of everything he meets, and it often drives us crazy. He has never needed a TV, computer or tablet to entertain himself.
We gave our son an iPad at age 5, with unlimited access to the internet and he looked everything up himself. I understand many parents are concerned by the potential of device addiction, but we decided the benefits outweighed the risks. By his teens, our son had grown bored of games and used his internet access to learn how to play the keyboard and guitar and compose music (at age 12, he won several eisteddfod first prizes playing his own arrangements, against AMEB grade 5 & 6 music students) and optimised his techniques for a range of track & field events for which he competed at state sports level (based on all his PBs, if we had allowed him to do pole vaulting, he would have been very competitive at national level for the decathlon), so with these activities (daily music practice & training), he spent less time on electronic devices than any of his peers.
