history

Experience History Through Your Music Talent

How does a parent realistically provide for the time and energy to develop a super-talented child?

On the one hand, you might be concerned about ripping the family apart because 15 year old Susan needs to be taken every night to her training and taken every other weekend out of town in order to progress to the next level of her talent. If that’s the case and you are more tender-hearted, then you are likely to abandon the effort in order to save the family. If you are more ruthless, you might decide it is in fact worth ripping the nuclear family apart and spend every spare moment of the family’s normal rest time to go all out for it. If you do go that route, you have to be aware that parents might divorce over the toll that it can take. I’ve painted extremes ends of different types of reactions can have to the presence of real emerging talent in their son or daughter’s life. Nevertheless those dangers are common enough occurrences that could become a reality in your family if you don’t have a strategy in place.

So is there anything you can do that still allows you to not be quitters with regards to your child’s talent and still allows you to keep the family harmony intact? Yes, yes, and yes!

One of those yeses is because you can take advantage of the fact that you are homeschooling your child and are therefore in charge of your normal school curriculum. So for example, if your child’s long-term talent has music as its core skill, then you should seriously consider choosing a history curriculum that will study the time periods through the expression of the lyrics and songs written during that time. This means that if you are studying history one hour a day through the music and lyrics of that time, then you will automatically be turning that hour into one of pushing your child’s talent deeper into his intellectual understanding. If you also should choose to have your child practice in the next hour, composing new lyrics in the style of that era on the topics of concern in that era, then you would be combining her English writing time with talent development. Again, her art would be pushed deeper into her mind and broaden her musical abilities.

If you really pick-up the spirit of dovetailing school work with talent time, then you could also focus on the science of sound and mathematics of sound when you realize that you can choose to focus on an aspect of science and math that supports your daughter’s talent growth.

Once you start dovetailing your school time with your child’s talent development time, the stress of trying to be like everyone with normal school and the stress of trying to find a separate, additional time for talent will evaporate. Harmony in the family will be restored and your daughter will be compounding the benefits of what were previously completely unrelated skills.

If you sign up for my newsletter, the first thing I will send you is worksheet to help you evaluate your current school time against one of how it could look if you leverage it to develop talent at that same time. So forward this post now to a friend who’s looking to get ahead with their child’s talent. Have them sign-up for my newsletter of weekly tips and I will immediately send them that worksheet too.

Write Lyrics For Your History Lesson

Jonathan

Notebook collection — Work through your standard history course by creating a custom notebook collection of song lyrics your music child makes about that time period (Photo credit: Dvortygirl)

For a child who has a musical skill as part of a core long-term talent that is developing, you can still turn your normal history curriculum into a curriculum that supports your child’s talent growth. One way to do that is that is to have your child write new song lyrics to fit an existing modern song at the end of each and every history lesson that your son or daughter finishes.

The objective is twofold. The first objective is that by constant and consistent production of lyrics, your child will force himself to daily keep producing as fast as possible new lyrics in order to keep up with the lessons. The history content of the lesson is the fodder and message that your child is able to use immediately so he can focus exclusively on lyric composition.

The second objective is that by wrestling with creating new lyrics every day, your child will easily assimilate the meaning he believes the history lesson is trying to convey. This wrestling with the content will peg the purely historical information onto his growing song writing abilities and lock it into his mind permanently. He will remember history better than if had just studied and answered the standard curriculum questions directly.

Here is a link on how your child can get started writing lyrics today with intro, verse, bridge, and chorus words:

http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Song

Turn Socrates into Talent Time

Jonathan

You can turn every standard hour of history learning into an opportunity to push his talent forward.

How do you turn a standard history lesson on Socrates into an opportunity to build talent?

I will share with you how my 15 year old son is using history curriculum to push his talent forward. At the end of each hour of study for his Western Civ class, he allots 10 to 15 minutes to producing a single visual graphic that conveys one specific message of that lesson. This daily exercise forces him to focus on speed and efficiency in the use of his Adobe photo editing tools and forces him to wrestle abstract concepts into modern images that are attractive and yet still clearly convey a message that others can understand. Those two skills are being daily trained because the history gives him the necessary fodder to train himself to convey value and meaning, instead of just playing with visual effects that have no purpose. The side benefit to being talent driven first is that history is much easier to assimilate (a.k.a. “pegged” to his talent) because he has to interpret its message in a relevant manner each and every time.

How to Make Your Professor Build Your Son’s Talent

Jonathan

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.

She is Drawing, Not Talking Her Way Through History

Jonathan

What if your arts talented daughter could draw through most of her history curriculum, instead of talking and writing her way through it? Wouldn’t that accelerate her talent development?

What do you do with an arts oriented daughter who is having difficulty following a standard history curriculum? Instead of keeping her at a disadvantage, put her talent back in service by having her sketch or trace scenes from that time in history using the many available art history books. Because artists will have specifically focused on important points from that era, it will be easy for your daughter to draw her way through history, rather than primarily talk and write her way through it. Instead of losing time building her talent while she is doing traditional schooling, she is actually gaining ground and learning how paid artists apply their trade to bring value to others.