Month: May 2012

“Cherry pick” the best of other people’s learning styles and adapt them to fit your custom 10,000 hours of talent building for your child. Because you homeschool, you can afford to pick and choose only the best and thereby avoid mediocrity right from the beginning. To do this you have to accept that it is rare to find in one individual all the learning patterns and examples you need to copy, so be prepared to get aggressive about acquiring tips and tricks from many different sources. One family may excel at extracting learning opportunities when out in nature while another may excel at mathematical learning techniques. Copy those friends ONLY in those areas of learning where they excel.

Unless your goal is to turn your 10,000 hours of talent into an art focus, then all the sketching ability your child will need can be easily satisfied by an online art doodling course. Our homeschooling family has been following the Mark Kistler drawing program and I’m happy to report you can now get free online lessons at Mark Kistler Online Video Art Academy. You can also order the hardcopy sketching and doodling program entitled Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad and Drawing in 3D with Mark Kistler . This will give your child the confidence he needs to sketch out his ideas and visually document the concepts he is assimilating.

Baseball Card image collections for your child’s talent would be a great way to build visual and emotional excitement for your son or daughter. How can you do that when your focus is actually NOT about building 10,000 hours of talent toward a baseball career? There’s a simple answer: use one of the many new Social Media tools available on the Internet. Two very popular tools for creating and sharing image collections are www.flickr.com and www.pinterest.com

Create an account under your name for your child if he is not old enough to open one under his own authority.

 

Don’t have your child try to excel at everything he does in pursuit of building 10,000 hours of talent.

Why?

There are some building block activities that contribute toward  your child’s talent, but not every activity should be pursued to a level of world-class performance. For example, one of my children is interested in minerals and would profit from learning how to use a  microscope to study his material at a deeper level. However he would not gain by becoming an expert in microscopes. Added expertise, beyond proficiency, would only detract him from focusing and building up his core interest.