Do you have your custom plan in place for this year’s talent development in your child? (Photo credit: J’Roo)
My friends at the fivejs.com website are purveyors of helpful and nifty tips and reviewers of resources that support homeschoolers. What they also do is boldly post their curriculum plans for each of their children for the up-coming year. In this year’s plan they are showing by their list of choices for their oldest son that they creatively substituting some standard type courses for very specialized ones that push deeper into expertise one of several sub-skills that their son needs to become very, very good at what he hopes to do. Pop Quiz: Do you think this talent focus will make him more or less attractive to immediate employment and college recruiters? If you were the recruiter, would you rather that young man be with or without his talent identity well under way?
MOTH – the ultimate guide to desiging your own custom homeschool schedule(Photo credit: Fastin8)
In our early homeschool years, we came across the MOTH manual on how to design daily routines and schedules that restore sanity to your life without foregoing the goals you originally set out to meet. The guide helps you avoid creating daily routines that just fill up your day with no real big-purpose. It’s the grind and it’s bad and it typically afflicts new homeschoolers who are trying to out-do the classroom setting by just piling it deeper and meaner in the home. The other extreme is no daily routine at all that engenders sheer chaos when you have many small children living under the same roof. The MOTH daily routine designer is the ultimate customizing guide – it will even teach you how to schedule yourself to be unscheduled!
My son Caleb checking up on our recently updated daily routine that includes some of the standard type courses from the online Ron Paul Curriculum.
Sanity: it’s about creating a daily routine that makes sense because it has a purpose. That’s where I do build in a daily routine for outright pure talent focused activities, independent of whether or not it ties into standard school curriculum. Into the daily routine, I also make room for standard type courses – but I do NOT allow them to dictate the direction of where all this schooling and learning is going to take my sons. For example, if you acquire a superbly designed grammar course and you don’t dominate and dictate its role in your child’s overall plans, you will soon find that the author’s goals will try to crowd out you and your child’s goals. Without you meaning to, the grammar expert speaking through your curriculum starts trying to take direction of your child’s time and priorities. Don’t let that happen. Stay in control as the parent. Instead make that course sit timidly in the corner of the room to come into your child’s schedule only at your beck-and-call.
Your child should log how his traditional course connects and applies to his developing talent.
My son Nicholas, who is 11 years old, has started a new online math course that he is enjoying very much. One of the course goals is for him to keep an personal log of what he is learning in his own words. In this picture you can see him writing in a Moleskin notebook about that day’s lesson and you can also see in the background the whiteboard (propped up on our baby’s high-chair) he uses to teach back to his younger brother what he learned. What you can’t see though is that he is also logging extra notes and thoughts about how the different type of numbers are handled in the coding languages he is learning as part of his on-going coding talent. This is one of the ways he is able to use a traditional content course like the one from Grade 8 Math by Benjamin Richards (available at RonPaulCurriculum.com) to support and develop a stronger control of his core talent.
Weigh in the balance as to whether that course will help your child’s talent more or less than the other course your child could take (Photo credit: Sheba_Also)
When I look at the 10,000 hour talents I am encouraging my children to develop, I don’t think in terms of the name of a career I am trying to get them into. Rather I think in terms of gradually adding skill after skill onto maybe a traditionally labeled career, yes, but I keep going until the end result is something very unique. So when I am getting my children started on some new courses, as for example from the RonPaulCurriculum website, I don’t just grab whatever is available to fill up my sons daily schedule. I weigh the time commitment of an otherwise well-taught course in the light of whether or not it can help my child build his talent faster or better. This includes supporting skills – so for my son Nicholas, even though he has a plate full of talent building hours right now, I did sign him up for one of the online math classes by Benjamin Richards as I see it as a supporting skill for his programming talent.
We are making Tom Woods’ history expertise serve the needs of my son’s 10,000 hours of talent building. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)
This week has been an exciting launch for three of my sons into the online world of RonPaulCurriculum.com
My boys are motivated by the no-nonsense content-rich curriculum with a modern format that suits them well: YouTube style talking head, with a strong male expert or full-time professional in the subject matter, with screen shots of key points, replay-able as often as you want.
Yes, but how I am using these courses to push my sons talents forward? For example, on the Western Civilization history course by Tom Woods, one of the first topics was on the history of the Hebrews. So in counter point, my oldest son did his own simple research on the type of Jewish coins used during that time period because his talent interest includes the study and use of money and coins. As he progress through that history course he will continue to intertwine the historical knowledge of that course with the specific historical knowledge of the skills that build his talent.
No need to buy the whole e-course if all your child needs is some inspiration to get him going. This is how you can get the talented child in your house to build his portfolio for viewing on the World Wide Web. Enjoy!
Saw this at my local coffee shop. It is similar to the Biblical proverb that says: “He who goes about as a talebearer reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy conceals a matter”
As Dad and Mom, we are currently having great discussions with the teenagers in our house on the topic of proverbs (“up a creek without a paddle”, “he who snoozes looses”, “don’t spill the beans”, etc.) How do you stay practical so that you define success in a way you can recognize it in the workplace and in the exercise of your talent? I recommend you download this free e-book entitled “Wisdom and Dominion” written by Gary North about the book of Proverbs in the Holy Bible. Download here: http://www.garynorth.com/WisdomAndDominion.pdf
Excerpts from the introduction:
“In order to persuade His covenant people to become highly motivated to discover, develop, and implement their individual talents in a program of kingdom extension, God offers a comprehensive program of self-improvement. This program is presented in the Book of Proverbs. This book is God’s handbook for self-improvement. There is none like it in the ancient world.”
“There are numerous sub-themes in those proverbs that are devoted to economics.”
“Each of these themes has several proverbs associated with it. All of these themes are important for devising and implementing a lifelong plan of personal success. Among these are:
