Should I Homeschool My Gifted Child?

Welcome to the Vanguard Gifted Academy educational blog. We’re continuing our Selecting the Best School for Your Gifted Child series, and this is installment four, entitled “Should I Homeschool My Gifted Child?” My name is Trista McMorrow.  I attended a school for gifted children and went on to become a gifted-certified teacher in a public school. I’m currently a mother of four gifted children whom I have chosen to homeschool.

Homeschooling gifted children can be beautiful as well as challenging. Giftedness presents itself in many ways; it rarely looks the same for any two individuals. As a parent, you know your children best, and you do not need formal testing to certify your children as gifted. Rather, you get to invest in each child and focus on their strengths and weaknesses.

At home, you can encourage gifted learners to dive deeply into their own interests, whether that be coding, music, languages or art. With homeschooling, just like in mainstream education, there are many approaches to learning.

Charlotte Mason

The Charlotte Mason approach is a literature-based approach to education. Children read rich texts and all other topics spin off their reading. Unit studies are another great homeschool tool for families. This is where the whole family dives into a single topic — all of their books, projects and writing assignments stem from the unit.

Classical

Another popular method of homeschooling is the classical approach. This approach focuses on memory work for the younger students and then transforms into analyzing that knowledge as they get older.

Traditional

There’s also the traditional method of homeschooling, which is just what it sounds like. It’s bringing the traditional school setting home with reading, writing and arithmetic all separate from one another. 

Homeschooling Approaches in Practice

More often than not, homeschooling tends to be a hodgepodge of all these techniques and more. Homeschooling does not and should not look exactly like a school classroom in the home. We can start the school year one way and shift gears halfway through the year. In my family, we use a Charlotte Mason style history curriculum, traditional math and writing curriculums, and some memorization to add a bit of classical flair. We paused all of our normal schooling when it got stale, and we did a family unit study for a month and then hopped right back into our more structured approach.

Homeschooling’s Flexibility

The beauty of homeschooling is its flexibility. Anyone can homeschool. There are working parents who choose to homeschool on the evenings and weekends and stay-at-home parents who set a timer from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Monday through Friday to block out school time. Other families simply live life and have a set of expectations that each child needs to complete by the end of the day, allowing the students to manage their own time. Parents can finish a day of homeschooling in as little as two hours a day for younger students, but it can also take up to 10 hours a day if your learner stumbles upon something that really makes them tick. Homeschooling can be hands-on for hands-on learners or computer-based for visual, technological students. Parents who are intimidated by the workload can use a pre-generated open-and-go curriculum and just follow right along. But parents who want to challenge themselves can jump fully in and prepare everything themselves.

People often ask me, “What if my child is smarter than me?” I love to answer that question with the fact that intelligence and wisdom are very different. And even if your student is faster at memorizing facts and figures than you ever were, you have the wisdom as their parents to gauge their learning styles and your teaching abilities.

Don’t think you need to do this alone, either. Many homeschooling parents get together in co-ops to do certain classes together. There are support groups online and in-person for however you choose to homeschool so it no longer feels like you’re doing it alone. 

Socialization & College Preparedness

Another common worry is about how homeschooled children will stay socialized. Just so you know, many public schools will accept homeschool students in their after-school activities such as sports, debate club, chess club and math team. Look into your local school laws for your options here. There are also plenty of homeschool PE classes, music classes, homeschool co-ops, art clubs, etc. The homeschool community has done a ton of growing in the past decade, and you will be surprised to see the variety of options available to you for support.

Also, please don’t worry about your kids getting into college. Many colleges are starting to see homeschooling as a positive feature on applications these days because many homeschooled children enter knowing how to self-teach. These students often prove themselves to be capable of success in post-secondary education.

Homeschooling Challenges

That sounds absolutely perfect, doesn’t it? Well, I’m sorry to pop the bubble I just created, but homeschooling gifted children is also a huge challenge. Gifted children tend to require lots of stimulation and activities. Many gifted children are strong-willed and have their own opinions on what and how they should learn. Some gifted children struggle with perseverance, some with social skills and others grapple with anxiety and overachieving. Their giftedness lies in the processing power of their brains. However, they still need to develop the other areas of their lives. They need to learn that there’s more to life than facts and figures. Being at home allows you to pause the book-learning and focus on their character when problems arise. If your child is having crippling anxiety over math, pause and return to it later or reassess the approach you’re taking to math and try something else.

If your learner has a particular challenge, add it to the daily routine. Do a unit study on historical figures who have shown great kindness and empathy, for example.

Homeschooling allows you to consider your whole child and provide whatever accommodations in their learning you think they need.

Conclusion

Is it enough? That’s the question that homeschool parents ask themselves every day. The true answer is that you cannot put an hour stamp on learning. You do need to make sure that your students are gaining and learning, and you need to check on your local laws and know what they need to learn each year.

In the end, homeschooling allows parents to focus on their learners’ individual strengths and weaknesses and to create an atmosphere and culture of learning within their family. Books come with us everywhere we go. My kids enjoy friends and extracurricular activities, and we face our struggles together. Homeschooling gifted children is about more than getting them to learn as much as they can from books. It’s about teaching them how to be excited about learning and how to work hard. It is focusing on strengthening their strengths and giving them the power to overcome their weaknesses.

Thank you for reading the Vanguard educational blog. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us. Please return soon as Shannon Holub helps us examine what gifted programming looks like in independent schools. In the meantime, delve deeper into the unique challenges involved in teaching gifted students with this past blog entry.