Develop your child’s talent with these eight principles:
- Start young
- Practice daily
- Use your environment and assets
- Decompose talent into smaller skills
- Merge skills from different fields
- Enlist family goals and desires
- Act out the talent in a way that gives value to others
- Make your homeschool curriculum feed your child’s talent
The nice thing about this approach is breaking it down in small components. This gives the child (and parent!) a sense of success and may show a new direction
For a long time I thought we were interest-led learners (in addition to being eclectic, at times classical and sometimes unschoolers!). In fact we are really educating our girls according to their individual talents. I love the wisdom you share about this topic and how it is living out in my home.
Jessica, I think what it is new about this age of homeschooling is that we now have access to so much learning information, so much so, that it becomes possible to really focus on developing a child’s talent, rather than just add more data points to memorize. When reading books on talent development, you realize that it is very advantageous to start early, but there can be practical problems in finding time to pursue it when your day is already dictated and filled by the learning agenda of your local public school. With homeschooling however, you don’t necessarily have to have that problem anymore!