When studying a particular time period in the course of your standard homeschooling curriculum, have your son or daughter choose to read a biography of an individual who excelled in some particular area of focus related to his long-term term interest. This is not only a great way to build a deep understanding into the 10,000 hours of talent building, it is also a great way to peg general historical facts into a living context. History becomes very detailed and real because as he accumulates his reading of specialized biographies, he increases his ability to understand the general limitations and opportunities of a specific time period. For example, knowing the amount of timber, effort, and cost that smelting ore for 130+ warships in 1588, before the advent of Bessemer process, it really brought home to my 12 year old son the scale of the Spanish Armada preparing for war with the English. He was already familiar with some of the dramatic advances that new smelting techniques had brought to the world in the 1800s, so when he reads of vast quantities of copper and iron being smelted before those technological advances, he could correctly assess the deadly seriousness of the Spanish Armada in the 16th century.
