Online education for gifted homeschoolers
This may seem off-topic, but if you stick with me, you will see its relevance to writing.
Some of you may remember this post I did over a year ago called “Gifted Children and the Gift of Stories.” Whatever the politically correct term is, there are tens of thousands of families out there who have to deal daily with the ups and downs of raising exceptionally bright children who simply can not fit into any public school setting, including magnet schools, or even private schools. Often what happens is families have to take on the additional responsibility of homeschooling their children for at least part if not all the years through what would be the equivalent of high school.
Our family has had to make this choice. It has forced me to be the person responsible for making money, while my wife Rebecca homeschooled our oldest son Will for 2 years [middle school], and has in the past and continues to homeschool our youngest son Luke since second grade [technically he is a rising 7th grader].
As all such families know, it is a challenge to find educational resources that meet the unique needs of gifted children whose minds are like sponges, soaking up everything, hungry for more and more knowledge. This has led Rebecca on a decades long quest throughout a myriad of online resources. As a result of her massive research efforts and her first-hand experience teaching our son and a group of local homeschoolers, Rebecca has been asked to oversee the launch of an online education initiative with the Gifted Homeschoolers Forum. There are four courses currently available:
Literature of Identity and Belonging [Fall, Spring semesters]: Taught by Rebecca McMillan.
Statistics for Skeptics [Fall semester]: Taught by Heather Blonsky.
Think Your Way Out of a Paper Bag: Critical Thinking and Argumentation [Spring semester]: Taught by Rebecca McMillan.
The Hero’s Journey [Fall, Spring semesters]: Taught by Scott Myers.
You may find out more about each course here.
Heather Blonsky has coached MathCounts, Math Olympiad, and American Math Competition teams, and taught math and science classes for homeschoolers for the past eight years. She has been a freelance database developer supporting medical research and social service data needs for 16 years.
Rebecca McMillan has worked with gifted children in a variety of contexts for more than 20 years. In addition to homeschooling her own profoundly gifted sons for 7 years (and counting!), she has taught gifted students a wide range of subjects ranging from Shakespeare and Tolkien to History of Science and Zome-based Geometry. She is founder of The Brain Café, a Facebook group for those interested in exchanging information on neuroscience, psychology, creativity and education.
And you know about me.
Rebecca, Heather and I are doing this because of our direct experience with gifted children and their distinctive needs. Speaking personally, I’m excited about my class because I get to introduce high schoolers and advanced middle schoolers to Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, The Hero’s and Heroine’s Journey, and lots of great stories including books like “The Princess Bride,” “The Odyssey,” “Beowulf,” “Frankenstein,” “The Hunger Games,” “True Grit,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” poems, and movies like O, Brother Where Art Thou, The Wizard of Oz, Searching for Bobby Fisher, The Hunger Games, True Grit, To Kill a Mockingbird, Alice in Wonderland, and Up. Each week we will learn a new principle of storytelling, then use that to analyze the books we read and movies we watch. Also students will keep their own Hero’s Journal / Heroine’s Journal in which they pen everything from reflections about course content to character monologues to fictional vignettes, all with an eye toward developing their language and writing skills.
If you know a family who homeschools and you think might be interested in a new educational resource through the Gifted Homeschoolers Forum, please send them this link. If successful, GHF would like to expand the curriculum to offer a much greater array of online resources for gifted young people and their families.
For more information about GHF, go here.
For the online courses cited above, go here.
Thanks for spreading the word.
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