(Please proceed to ready only if you are interested in learning more about the 'Sravani Academy' clan, homeschooling, profoundly gifted (pg) kids, challenges and so on. Otherwise you can safely skip this long winding Q and A section. This section is long, as I have tried to answer the questions I get regarding our homeschool journey. I could not fit all that I wanted to share here, but tried giving an idea of what this journey means to us. This is just our experience and opinion. Each child is different, the needs are different, and I would not say that my kids experiences or our experiences are typical.
My message here is that we listen to our children and their needs, and follow their lead, and it seems to work best for our children. )
Why did we choose to Homeschool?
Our oldest had a miserable experience with both public and private school experience at age 4. She was advanced way beyond her grade levels, and so she was grade skipped to part 2nd grade and part Kinder. After a few months, she needed more grade skips. Such grade skips, pull out programs, differentiation did not work for her. At the same time my ds was miserable in his preschool, and did not enjoy attending it. He spent his days by himself, with his own toys and books, much like my dd. They made no friends and seemed odd balls in their schools.
After consulting the specialists and psychologists, we realized that both our children are Profoundly gifted. And that they learned, thought, and operated entirely differently from what the schools would want them to do or how other children learned. Dd when assessed was able to solve math problems in areas that she has never exposed to before at a tender age of 5. We realized she taught many things to herself intuitively even without a book in her hand, at very young age. Ds was able to deduce patterns, answers, and understand the world and people around him, way maturely than his age peers. He could navigate us through the maze of city roads and free-ways around 4, and spotted when we took different routes, and could compare which took shorter or longer to the destination. He had unique talents and interests on creating documents, programming, analyzing different fonts, etc at a fairly young age, which set him far apart from his age-mates even more.
We were faced with situations where the kids knew more than their teachers, and were faced with situations of arguments with them in order to explain why they had the correct information. Having come from an Asian system of culture and education, I was caught between teaching my children to please their teachers/elders no matter what, versus to explain to the teachers /elders to respect their learning and knowledge, irrespective of their young ages. I had to take steps to understand and explain to them that the kids did not mean to disrespect them, but merely just too deeply passionate about their learning, and bestowed with just too much intelligence and thinking abilities. My kids were not enjoying their school life. It seemed like they were learning purely by 'osmosis', and preferred to be just left alone to their books and materials, and then they were doing fine. They seemed to need less interference from adults, and needed more freedom to learn at their levels.
We decided to follow the expert's advice, as well my children's plea to keep them home to let them learn at their pace and levels. We have never looked back since then. (Please check Hoagies for gifted and Profoundly Gifted articles. You can find the links in my blog under gifted links).
How do you homeschool?
In CA, the homeschoolers can choose to establish their own private school by means of filing a Private School Affidavit(PSA). That is how we began our homeschool journey and continue to do so even today. Homeschooling works differently for different families. There are other ways to homeschool in CA as well as around the country. Please check the CHN(CA Homeschool Network) and HSC (Homeschool Association of CA) websites for more details.
How does homeschool work for your family?
For us it took a couple of years to achieve a balance in home learning life. I actually prefer to call this 'home learning' than 'homeschool', as what we do would rarely seem like 'school'. What I say here can make me look like an irresponsible homeschooling parent. But the truth is that this kind of learning(even though it would seem like no active learning happened all the time), worked best for my kids. Also, remember each kid learn differently, and families do homeschooling differently.
They learn all through the year and take breaks whenever they need to. We have no set school room and such. We have not followed any particular curriculum, textbooks, schedules, grade level placements, workbooks etc. Actually, I do not remember making them sit in front of desks and cram materials ever. I did not 'teach' them. Most of all their learning happened just as plain discussions and voracious reading. We never used flash cards; we never taught our kids to read or to do math. (Hard to believe this, but truthfully some kids do not need to be taught or made to do things). No Kumon or Abacus math programs. They read and questioned a *ton*. (My oldest is nicknamed by friends and family as 'Question Girl' and my ds as 'is it because?' man' and 'Why Man'. They will bring questions or thoughts to us and prod more in-depth discussions.
All we did was read to them a lot when they were young. They asked a ton of questions, and we answered the best we could; or found the answers together, when we did not know the answers ourselves. Once they took off on independent reading, their learning became totally self-directed. They both wrote to the specialists /experts in the areas of their interests, quite independently when they needed more answers. They became experts on Google searches very early on, and were way mature. They just preferred being independent and once the responsibility of planning their day worked well for them. Since the beginning of our homeschool journey, they have been choosing their learning schedule and their subjects of interest.
We pooled the materials together from assorted resources, online materials, and from libraries. They learned from plenty of books, talking to other adults in the areas of specialization, by doing tons of field trips. My kids learned to read at a very young age, and even before we knew it, they were reading materials meant for higher aged kids quite independently. When I say they read higher level materials, I mean that they were comprehending, analyzing, connecting and extrapolating higher materials/concepts of varied backgrounds whether it was science or philosophy or history or math. Their questions were deeper and philosophical in nature.
What about Socialization in homeschooling?
I get this question a lot like many other homeschoolers. Folks who know my kids, and spend some time with them, never pose such a question. My kids are not trapped at home all day. To the contrary, we are rarely home. Our learning happens outside of home. My kids love the outdoors. Even if we don’t have a need to get out of home some days, my kids prefer doing their learning in a park, library or book store. We picnic, play around and then sit under a tree lost in our book worlds. We laze around in the lawn watching the weather, sky, clouds, birds, making up stories or poems. We played plenty of games. We spend enormous times mingling with other members of the community, of varied ages, in cafes, book stores, grocery/shopping, co-op classes, university and college campus, field trips, libraries etc.
They get to meet people of different ages and plenty of adults every day. They take classes with multiple aged kids because the classes are based on ‘ability’ in our 'homeschool community’, as opposed to grade or age. This is how the real world is. We rarely congregate with the same aged people in our day to day life in the real world. Instead we meet and mingle with people of various ages and abilities and interests. Isn’t a school classroom a wrong way to think of socialization? I believe my kids get plenty more opportunities to socialize than an average school going kid.
Are you capable of teaching all subjects?
Well, let’s see, first off we do not teach. We facilitate. Secondly, we learn alongside of the kids. Thirdly, we hold research degrees and have plenty of exposure to math and sciences (and other subjects too), which kind of forms basics of many things my kids are interested in doing. Fourthly, we are excited about learning ourselves. If it gets out of hand, we resort to outside classes by hiring specialists to help our kids. For example, recently we formed an Honors Chemistry lab classes for some gifted kids (ages 8-11) through a co-op and hired a Chemistry PhD to teach the class. She was not only well versed in the subject, but extremely passionate in teaching our kids, and they loved the classes. It is not because I cannot facilitate a science class with labs for my children, but more so because it helps that the kids learn with a group, from a passionate subject major, and gets an added benefit of being with children of varied abilities and backgrounds. Living in the bay area, we have an advantage, that when we feel the need, we were always able to find ways to be able to achieve such a class or activity for the children. Since we homeschool, we have plenty of freedom to be able to find the opportunities that are right and fitting for our kids. And even if such possibilities did not exist here, I would have been confident enough to find a way to replicate all of it in our own home.
How does your unschooling or child led learning work?
We explore multiple subjects and areas in our home learning journey; we did/do plenty of arts, field trips, play groups, park days and games. Every opportunity we got, we used it as a learning experience. Kids have time to be silly and goofy, as well as to seriously explore various interests. They have the time to think and ponder, to indulge in serious learning, to fail and also to learn from failures, to work hard on something, to master it - to build it up consistently and slowly.
We gave importance to their understanding, than 'vomiting' of memorized rote learning and meaningless tests. They loved doing research projects, listening to audio books, watching and listening to educational DVDs, programs, movies and lectures, going to field trips and doing travels. We went on multiple international trips to Europe and Asia; we travel widely within US. We meet various people of different cultures and ages. Our family moves everywhere as a unit. My husband's research job conferences become our vacation travels. This lets our kids meet various researchers and students in the local universities as they would insist on being taken for visit. This trend of visiting universities started when they were young and continues even today; any international visits or domestic travels we do, kids always visit the local universities, attend talks and meet people.
My kids get a chance to try different things before they choose to concentrate on learning something more seriously. They do science, math research projects and arts projects because they want to. They compose music in their violin and piano, and perform. They learn to do chores around the home. They work in the garden and plant beans, corn, herbs, pumpkins etc; they study birds and animals in the backyard; they watch planets and go tide pooling; they volunteer in the local hospitals by playing music. They ran homeschool newsletters; they publish stories and poems in magazines; they read widely and voraciously.
They question everything and seek out answers. The 'world' became their 'classroom'; their 'observations' around the world, and the 'questions' that resulted in it, became the 'reason for their quest and learning'. The libraries, other adults, family members, professionals, mentors, peers, books, web research, hands on projects, co-op classes, etc became the means of finding answers. Their imagination, extrapolation, synthesis of their thinking and elaborate discussions, intelligent and healthy arguments became their ways of assimilating knowledge.
They are stubborn on some thoughts and challenge even adults with it. And in some, they needed more growth and experience to learn. They are in complete control of how they choose to learn and what they choose to learn; but at the same time, they are mindful and respectful of their freedom as well.
No expectations, boundaries, or restrictions in what and how they learn. And they have fun with such learning. We see them working intently for long hours enjoying such challenging learning, and it is hard to stop them from doing it.
How do you manage to keep their fire for learning lit in all areas of learning?
By keeping out of their way and mode of learning! By not orchestrating their learning, but giving them the responsibility of their own learning!
Seriously, we did not take any special efforts. I just needed to be open minded, have faith in their learning, as well as be a bit creative. It took a while for us to understand their needs, as well as to understand how best they learned or preferred to learn. They hated lectures or teaching, and preferred discussions. They seemed to know a ton already, with no prior learning, which made me realize that they intuited a lot, along with their wide, indepth, independent, voracious reading. They hated bench work, and did not need hours to learn something, but learned things rapidly, in whole concept form, by skipping many steps leading to such a concept. They were able to achieve mastery, and understanding without spending too much time on the materials; To help me understand their learning, they loved to write as in type documents or power point slides. That was my ds' choice of output. My dd love giving talks, and teaching things to us. And that was her choice of output.
Eventually, when the need arose, they also took to handwriting a ton of materials. I just learned to not panic, and not expect them to fit into a time frame of doing it all, as the world dictated it. I believe this attitude let them flourish extremely well in all areas, that too, earlier than normal, much to my surprise. I also realized that they connected various subjects in one topic of interest. It became easier about all subjects, once I realized this about their learning. And for subjects like history/geography/politics/worldly issues, it became easier to get it all from varied reading materials, watching educational videos and discussions with us and other adults. They loved it. Academics is just a small part of child's life. We as a family learned that it would grow on its own terms, if the kids were given the responsibility of coming up with meaningful goals and reasons to learn something.
I believe they were able to keep learning, because things were chosen and done by them, that too for pure joy, irrespective of how hard really it is to work to learn them. And also because they were cheered and supported by us in their endeavors, without being judgmental about what they chose to learn or how they chose to learn. We let them learn by making mistakes, and that is hardest part of parenting.
Even though they learned things quickly, they also loved spending enormous time with challenging materials that got them to think. It was important that they learned that skill of working hard at something for long hours, *joyfully*. This I consider the biggest specialty of my children. I did not have to do anything special to orchestrate that either. They were able to extrapolate as well as intuit. Since they learned based on their interests, they naturally learned other aspects like writing, speech, typing documents, forming research reports, hands on projects, etc, without my having to expect them to produce them, without finding them burdensome. They were also very creative. Just to give an example, some of their learning were 'produced' by them as 'commercial ads' to us. They formed the characters, plot, wrote the ad or a drama to put a show of their learning when they were young. They devised their own ways of learning things, and always carried a long list as to what they wanted to learn next. They never tired easily, and we were exhausted long before they did. They slept less, and always fought to learn more and more. The thing about my kids which I cherish the most is this constant thirst to keep learning. I have to forcefully stop them from reading constantly or learning something constantly. But that is their nature and normalcy to them.
We let their learning evolve with time, as their needs arose. I did not have any major challenges with respect to their learning. That could be because, we had no expectations with respect to how and what they should learn; Or it could also be because, they were naturally driven to learning, and would have been hard to stop them. They struggled to learn certain aspects (sometimes due to sheer laziness), such as, their lack of desire to do physical activities; also being highly sensitive, trying to understand and come to terms with the unjust world and hurt caused by it. And the need to change course or transitioning from one thing to another, especially something they were obsessed with, due to something called 'life' was hard for them; while other subjects came easy for them, (academics, math, sciences, history, music, creative arts, reading, writing, vocabulary, puzzles, spelling, creative pursuits, problem solving, research etc).
Both children were so different in their personalities, needs, interests and, attitudes which added to the challenges of parenting even more. Since they both are close in age and intelligence, there is also a strong competition and intense clash between them, which is an added challenge. I had to be creative in using hikes, state park visits, travels, biking, swimming, karate gardening, etc to get them take a liking to physical activities. They wanted purposeful activities. I also realized that they preferred meaningful hard working endeavors. As they grew older, the challenges of bringing them up has morphed, and evolved differently because of their unique needs, and we suspect that would be the case, as they grow more and more; But this makes parenting these profoundly gifted kids even more interesting.
What are the challenges with respect to raising pg/gifted kids?
There are plenty of challenges in raising any kid. Gifted kids add way more to the plate. And Profoundly Gifted kids can add even more to the challenge. I am only listing only a few here. To get an idea as to where Profoundly Gifted kids fall in a society, take a peek at the table below.
| Level | IQ Range | Prevalence |
| Mildly (or basically) Gifted | 115 - 129 | 1:6 - 1:44 |
| Moderately Gifted | 130 - 144 | 1:44 - 1:1,000 |
| Highly Gifted | 145 - 159 | 1:1,000 - 1:10,000 |
| Exceptionally Gifted | 160 - 179 | 1:10,000 - 1:1 million |
| Profoundly Gifted | 180+ | Fewer than 1:1 million |
My kids are perfectionists; so anything they learn need to be perfected to their satisfaction; and this can lead to emotional outbursts or frustration with the task that they love doing otherwise. Plus for both my kids, the standards of expectations from themselves is very high, and they would consider things a failure if it is not reached that perfection they had set their minds on.
They have high moral sense; so things of injustice they see in the world are hard for them to cope with. They have the tendency to worry about things which are way beyond their grasp, and want to find ways to fix them.
They are extremely sensitive and have extreme awareness to world pain. So we try to be careful of what they are exposed in everyday life. But they also demand that we be truthful and forthcoming. It is a hard balance to achieve. When they are exposed so, we need to help them in a supportive manner, with understanding and care, so that they can come to terms with what they see or hear about the world or family.
They can be extremely mature for their ages, which means it is a challenge for other family members and adults to understand them and to treat them equally. They can see through superficiality of other adults, and can be extremely sensitive to human behavior.
They are steadfast in their thinking and decisions, can drain us by arguing extremely intelligently. We give them the responsibility for their day's activities and also the limitations we have, so we treat them as individuals in a team of family.
They are asynchronous-meaning they could explain a high physics concept and proof amazingly well at age 6, behave maturely as a 20 plus yr old with an adult, and then can have emotional outbursts the very next minute as a 5yr old. (Although I am seeing the gap narrowing with respect to both my children). Or they can come up with some ingenious thoughts and questions that would stump the adults, and then the next minute can play silly songs playing goofy. They are like 20 plus year old brains trapped in the body of a 6 or 7yr old child. When and which may surface at any time is hard to know beforehand. Lately, we see an amazing mature side of my kids which makes us wonder if they have grown multiple years all in one night.
They could not (cannot even today for the most part) make friends easily without becoming/posing as someone else, meaning without being a 'chameleon'. Their expectations of what friendship means to them is extremely deep; more fitting to an adult mind. It is hard to find such friendships at their age. They had to learn to find friends based on common interests, and it was a learning curve which they still work at getting a handle on. Their soul mate mean someone who can share their interests at the same intensity and level, and usually it is very hard to find such a buddy in their ages. So, usually that means finding someone older with common interests and levels. Some of my kids' best friends with respect to their prime passions are their mentors who are much older in age. They also learn to separate friends based on activities: beading friends, swimming friends, movie going buddies, playgroup friends etc
Their intellectual peers are adults, older kids and other gifted kids who get their mind and thinking. They are always aware as to how different they are amongst a group of kids and families, and this can be burdensome because of their sensitivities and caring attitude for the world and others. My younger child hides his gifts, which is a hard challenge to cope. He tries to adapt to the situations he faces, and feels for others. He does not like to put down anyone for any reason. His first reaction is to go by what the other child would like to do, and will try hard not to hurt that child's feelings. So, instead of saying he knows something, he would say he just doesn't. This is something of a challenge to help him come to terms with accepting his gifts/talents without feeling guilty. Also, trying to teach him to sacrifice with limits, and to teach him to choose his own needs and comforts without being guilty.
There are times when I have seen my kids go into a state of Flow, and totally unaware of the world around them. This can be challenging and disturbing to handle depending on where they are at that moment.
Some of the learning comes easy for them; the downside of it was that there was a danger that they would not learn to work hard the moment they were faced with challenges. So, we had to constantly keep them challenged just a bit beyond their comfort level but below the ‘frustration’ level. This helped them to be challenged, happy and willing to work on materials for joy of learning. In this process, they were also learning to work hard all through. But to find such a ‘zone’ to keep for a long period of time was hard. Because they learned in leaps and bounds. Sometimes they zoomed through totally shocking us, and at times they had their ‘pause phase’ much against what we expected to happen. No matter what, they were and are incharge of their learning paths. The first time my daughter felt completely challenged was in an university, at an upper level math classes when she was 9, and she was in heaven at such an environment. My son's first college courses on Archeology, Programming, Astronomy, etc was the first time he felt he learned something fun and challenging.
Other adults, especially relatives, who come to know about my kids tend to think of ‘testing’ them as a proof to see if they are indeed as gifted. This can be so painful for the children, not because the testing is hard, but it is silly, and they see through the adult’s intentions and try to be mature and polite than the adults in question.
Due to voracious and way early reading and improper usage of lighting etc, my kids have vision issues. My kids *read all the time*, including even in the moving car. It has been a battle to be able to get them to do anything else. But these vision issues can surface with gifted kids a lot more purely because of there over usage of eyes with no breaks.
They are stubborn kids and have a way in their thinking and learning. We had to understand their quirkiness to accommodate their needs. For example, when young, my dd would work on her research until 2am, and would insist on being awake. We would let her be. But she has done some amazing proofs during that time. My ds works late into the nights, non stop on his projects using the laptop. If let be, he will never go to bed. They needed less sleep, and were able to operate fine during the day. Although that is changing a lot more due to set schedules in college classes and other courses in the recent months, their need to sleep very late is still an incorrigible behavior. I am constantly reminded of the psychologists' advice that I am dealing with a 20plus year old in mental age of my children and need to take this in stride.
They are highly intense kids, and that can be very overwhelming. Meaning, if they have a topic or thought going in their heads, they can go on for hours together deeply thinking and arguing about it for hours together. It can be a game or friends, or just an event for the day. This can be unbelievably and extremely *long non stop hours* with both kids. I need to intervene and forcefully get their breaks and pull them away from their world. This can be viewed as abnormal for their ages, and they have been the same since very young; but this is so normal to them. The level of work, their levels of interest in wanting to work etc can be sometimes too much beyond what an adult can handle. They can be extremely emotional and passionate about it at the highest intensity and drain the energy of an adult. Net effect, not many would come forward to keep my kids entertained:)
'Over excitability' (expanded awareness and a heightened capacity to respond to stimuli of various types) is a translation from a Polish term which means the capacity to be super-stimulated. Over excitability can be thought of as an abundance of physical, sensual, creative, intellectual and emotional energy that can result in creative endeavors as well as advanced emotional and ethical development in adulthood. As such, they are a positive force for the gifted, as they feed, enrich, empower and amplify talent. (Piechowski 1999). This can be extremely challenging and exhausting for parents to handle with respect to their pg kids. I have two kids who are so different, and exhibit these characteristics in various intensities in a day, simultaneously or at different point in a day and it is big challenge to be sane amidst all that. And add in a high intense parents to the mix, it can be very tricky and interesting roller coaster ride. We recognize, anticipate, communicate constantly about each of us to each other.
My kids amaze us with their rapid learning, deep creative thinking and questioning abilities. They are so giving to the community and constantly find ways to better themselves and grow. With respect to my children, it is not the rapid knowledge that they build that I consider special as part of their profound giftedness. It is not even their very high IQ score, or academic achievements, that seem to come as byproduct of their learning passions. But it is their unusual thinking process, varied interests, deep passions, their love for the world, community and all living beings, tireless learning to master something they set their minds to, extremely unique creative thinking and creative questioning abilities that stump even the specialists, high Emotional Quotient and sensitivities, are something I consider very special. And they are extremely sweet children with just a lot of intense desire to learn everything around them in one sitting.
What about high school and college learning? What are your kids' aspirations?
Since the kids were advanced at earlier ages, it soon became harder to satisfy their learning solely at home, using just co-ops and online classes. They both recognize their multiple interests and talents. My oldest did a wide variety of things, like dance, karate, drama, languages, debate, swimming, as well all the academic subjects and was good at anything she picked and pursued. She is also a great writer, and has been writing poems since 4 and continues to do so even today. As time went along, she wanted to choose a few to dive indepth for the benefit of learning the fullest. Though she dips into other sciences and completely enjoys them, she is a mathematician out and out. She wants to be a mathematician/researcher working with the mathematician 'rock stars'. While she participated in some of the science research courses through high school groups in the past couple of years, she felt that she had outgrown the high school courses long time back, but needed college level challenges. Since age 9, my extremely independent, and mature dd chose to take courses at the State Univ as well as in reputed private university as a high schooler. She gets an opportunity to work with mentors, and professors on higher math. That is her passion. She also reads a ton of classical literature and loves that aspect of life. She continues to learn Latin, Tamil, Sanskrit, violin, Carnatic vocal, swimming, photography, programming, writing, etc.
My ds continues to be in homeschool, while dipping into high school and college courses for certain subjects. He has multiple interests and feels he has not fully exhausted all of the available options in high school and online courses as of yet. He enjoyed his first college course of programming as an 8yr old, even though he was totally put off by all the attention. He is a gifted writer; He is also a self learner, with certain unique special interests. He finished his first science fiction novel at age 8. He started to write that novel around age 7. Prior to that, this novel was a short story written around 6, and it went through many drafts and changes in order to build it into a novel. When he is fixated passionately on something, time stands still for him, and I have loved that aspect of his learning. He preferred to learn things by himself, and has spent enormous times with Adobe Dreamweaver, programming books, typography books since a very young age., struggling through learning it.
He has been writing short stories, plenty of science documents and books since a young age, and he became adept in fast typing. He started to learn to type less than a year old and took off typing many documents by age 2. He writes for magazines and keeps writing more to publish it all as a series of books. He is gifted in music, and composes advanced level music for his sister to play in her violin. He is a gifted dancer and absolutely loves dancing. He loves Carnatic vocal too. He is also gifted in languages, and loves learning multiple languages. He loves research and did a human behavior and traffic study research project this year and won second place nationally. He also loves science research. He has many areas he wants to specialize in and wants to do them all. He also wants to contribute to the community and the world. He says the things he wants to do as a grown up is not even discovered yet.
Well, homeschooling has given my kids the time that they needed to blossom into whoever they want to be. It also gave them the time to delve deeper into their passions.
What about future plans? Will they ever return to school for high school?
My kids will probably never return to school, purely because the schools cannot do much for them. They are beyond that stage. Since dd has been taking university classes for the past 2yrs and she plans to continue doing it. She is turning out to be a wonderful mature person. She took her APs and SAT for her own interests and plans to take more APs. She also plans to move to full time college early. She is deeply interested in music and will continue to learn violin and Carnatic vocal. She wants to continue Latin and learn other languages. She wants to take psychology, philosophy and physics courses in college. She wants to continue to find new things to learn all the time, and do a lot of traveling, while taking the time to indulge in tons of reading, playing, hanging out with friends, doing arts and just having fun, living life. Entering a early college full time seem like a great option for her.
Though my ds has been dipping into college courses, he has been taking high school classes along side of it while taking advantage of some online courses. He wants to explore similar such options for a couple more years. He plans to take part time college classes while exploring other interests like science research. He plans to take similar exams like his sis. Music, languages, writing, CS and physics would be part of his life. He also did extremely well in the college Archeology course. He loved his honors chem. course this year. In addition he enjoys writing, arts, creating documents, web designing and animation. He plans to do another science research and an applied math research project this fall; He has tons of ideas to follow through in his research to find things out. He will also be doing high school biology course and labs coming fall and is very much looking forward to it. He wants to be scientist, writer, an inventor of some sorts, a composer, a musician.....and he will have lots of fun figuring it all out...In addition, both kids volunteer in the local hospitals, have plans to run a violin quartet in the summer, and try to find new things to do in terms of giving back to the community. I think for all of this they need unstructured time and space which only a homeschool can provide.
My biggest challenge:
The biggest challenge for me personally has been to find ways to nurture their learning and intellectual interests/ passions, while keeping them happy by meeting their emotional needs. This has been a learning process for all of us in our family. To learn more about giftedness, homeschooling, gifted homeschooling, bay area resources, profoundly gifted, please check my blog links in the side bar.
Lessons learned that might be of use to you:
Having come from an Asian culture where success is measured in terms of the educational degrees, the institutions attended, fame and earnings, it was interesting to learn from my kids the simple, but a much overlooked fact, that there is somethings like learning passion with an obsession, to learn to find answers to questions, and to form intelligent questions to find more answers. I realized it is not hard to become successful in the formal path what my culture dictates, and to become one of the 'cookies' in a 'cookie package'. But it is much harder to create this independent thinking, which my kids naturally possess; I strongly believe the world needs more thinkers. It is much harder to sustain that fire of learning driven by such independent thinking. Instead of fighting them to formulate according to what the majority does, I much preferred to let them follow their unique quests.
I have been told that my kids are prodigies by many people at many different times. And many have called them geniuses as well. I get quite a few people gather around them in curiosity, when they are at work of learning or in quest buried deep in their books, in public places like libraries, book stores or cafes with their books and materials. I have had interesting questions asked such as what I feed them to make them this intelligent. Some have even attempted to trace the root of their intelligence to my dh and/or myself (and their answers would depend on whom they liked more:)). I have spent many nights figuring what it all meant and also have read upon all the past prodigies and geniuses.
To me personally, these terms mean nothing. I came to know that many gifted children do such things young, but stop for some reason when they grow older. Or may be they are being just them, and the world just expected more out of them. Because it is very hard to sustain that demand of producing so much, with the increased levels of challenges and learning as these kids grow older. Doing calculus at 7 does not mean anything when a kid is unable to extrapolate and use it beyond such a learning. I realized that my kids finishing courses and knowing geometry, algebra or trigonometry at certain ages is meaningless, even though these came as self learning(as opposed to taught). But such learning does not take very far.
An intelligent kid can easily do these problems, set out by such courses or by parents or tutors teaching them. What is harder is for the kid to think for himself to go further beyond such a learning and 'sustain' such a quest. Often times, I see kids who are dazzlers and have amazing portfolio entering the IVY league colleges and then feel they have achieved it. BUT life starts just then. Learning to 'continue to learn', even after leaving the supervision of parents, is an important skill and that can happen only if there exists an internal drive towards such learning.
I also noticed that many have been successfully productive as adults, inspite of not doing much at the younger ages. And a few pg kids have done amazingly well as adults, and sustained the drive that they showed at young ages. It seems to me that the sustenance, hard work, focus, avid/passionate interest that drives one to such a success, also matters along with high intelligence. That internal drive from the kid is the key. The highest IQ scores do not guarantee anything. It definitely does not guarantee happiness to the child. It is their work, interest and their internal motivation that gets them there to the point of self growth, success and happiness, in the areas they think they want to be. So, when my dd produced a unique pattern of multiplication at age 5 and when she found some proofs at 7, which her profs found amazingly unique, it is true that we were absolutely shocked. She never had any formal learning of math, but her mere deep thinking just got her there. Genius and intuition mattered, but so did the time she spent thinking about it. She got and gets plenty of attention for her thinking abilities. But we brought ourselves to ground very quickly, because we wanted her to enjoy these extrapolations to the maximum joy she was seeking from them, without bracketing it and labeling her as a prodigy.
When my ds was spending hours together with his laptop at 5, we thought he was typing away stuffs. But we never expected him to learn Powerpoint to the extent of forming a presentation. We had no idea he had mastered it all until he formed a presentation on math that he had prepared for the science fair the following day, and showed us to print it out. I was humbled. I was amazed at this interest and patience to learn it and create such a wonderful presentation of comparing the pros and cons of Microsoft Word, LyX and WinEdt as the means of scientific documentation. I had not even known that he had dabbled with LyX and WinEdt. From his philosophical questions, his deep interests in sciences, astronomy, the world, his emotional maturity which is light years ahead than his age peers, his unique interests of identifying 400 different fonts, their creators, lives, ability to know and remember things about the world, which we would not expect kid of his age to know, etc, taught me one thing. That a pure passion driven learning, with no expectations or prodding from others, with no artificial ceilings, with no fear of failures, for one's own quest and joy, is a powerful and an amazing thing. And that my kids had this quality by nature. And I needed to preserve that.
I did not want to give importance to my kids' gifts, but more so to their ability to take up interests seriously and work towards them. I wanted to celebrate the joy the got out of such a quest. I became more confident of their paths with time, as well as with their ability to sustain such interests with increasing demands. We talk in-depth things about philosophy and life. We communicate constantly and learn from each other. But the humility that there is more to learn from the world and life is something that really keeps our family growing and learning every day. So, I would think if each of the family lets their children find their passions and interests, instead of expecting them to conform to what works for others or other gifted families, there would be more success in raising gifted kids into gifted and happy adults.
If you have any comments, questions about anything in my blog, kindly drop me a few lines at sravaniacademy at gmail dot com
Thank you.
"Justified computations make scientists understand the world of nature"
Archenia, at age 6
Well, homeschooling has given my kids the time that they needed to blossom into whoever they want to be. It also gave them the time to delve deeper into their passions.
What about future plans? Will they ever return to school for high school?
My kids will probably never return to school, purely because the schools cannot do much for them. They are beyond that stage. Since dd has been taking university classes for the past 2yrs and she plans to continue doing it. She is turning out to be a wonderful mature person. She took her APs and SAT for her own interests and plans to take more APs. She also plans to move to full time college early. She is deeply interested in music and will continue to learn violin and Carnatic vocal. She wants to continue Latin and learn other languages. She wants to take psychology, philosophy and physics courses in college. She wants to continue to find new things to learn all the time, and do a lot of traveling, while taking the time to indulge in tons of reading, playing, hanging out with friends, doing arts and just having fun, living life. Entering a early college full time seem like a great option for her.
Though my ds has been dipping into college courses, he has been taking high school classes along side of it while taking advantage of some online courses. He wants to explore similar such options for a couple more years. He plans to take part time college classes while exploring other interests like science research. He plans to take similar exams like his sis. Music, languages, writing, CS and physics would be part of his life. He also did extremely well in the college Archeology course. He loved his honors chem. course this year. In addition he enjoys writing, arts, creating documents, web designing and animation. He plans to do another science research and an applied math research project this fall; He has tons of ideas to follow through in his research to find things out. He will also be doing high school biology course and labs coming fall and is very much looking forward to it. He wants to be scientist, writer, an inventor of some sorts, a composer, a musician.....and he will have lots of fun figuring it all out...In addition, both kids volunteer in the local hospitals, have plans to run a violin quartet in the summer, and try to find new things to do in terms of giving back to the community. I think for all of this they need unstructured time and space which only a homeschool can provide.
My biggest challenge:
The biggest challenge for me personally has been to find ways to nurture their learning and intellectual interests/ passions, while keeping them happy by meeting their emotional needs. This has been a learning process for all of us in our family. To learn more about giftedness, homeschooling, gifted homeschooling, bay area resources, profoundly gifted, please check my blog links in the side bar.
Lessons learned that might be of use to you:
Having come from an Asian culture where success is measured in terms of the educational degrees, the institutions attended, fame and earnings, it was interesting to learn from my kids the simple, but a much overlooked fact, that there is somethings like learning passion with an obsession, to learn to find answers to questions, and to form intelligent questions to find more answers. I realized it is not hard to become successful in the formal path what my culture dictates, and to become one of the 'cookies' in a 'cookie package'. But it is much harder to create this independent thinking, which my kids naturally possess; I strongly believe the world needs more thinkers. It is much harder to sustain that fire of learning driven by such independent thinking. Instead of fighting them to formulate according to what the majority does, I much preferred to let them follow their unique quests.
I have been told that my kids are prodigies by many people at many different times. And many have called them geniuses as well. I get quite a few people gather around them in curiosity, when they are at work of learning or in quest buried deep in their books, in public places like libraries, book stores or cafes with their books and materials. I have had interesting questions asked such as what I feed them to make them this intelligent. Some have even attempted to trace the root of their intelligence to my dh and/or myself (and their answers would depend on whom they liked more:)). I have spent many nights figuring what it all meant and also have read upon all the past prodigies and geniuses.
To me personally, these terms mean nothing. I came to know that many gifted children do such things young, but stop for some reason when they grow older. Or may be they are being just them, and the world just expected more out of them. Because it is very hard to sustain that demand of producing so much, with the increased levels of challenges and learning as these kids grow older. Doing calculus at 7 does not mean anything when a kid is unable to extrapolate and use it beyond such a learning. I realized that my kids finishing courses and knowing geometry, algebra or trigonometry at certain ages is meaningless, even though these came as self learning(as opposed to taught). But such learning does not take very far.
An intelligent kid can easily do these problems, set out by such courses or by parents or tutors teaching them. What is harder is for the kid to think for himself to go further beyond such a learning and 'sustain' such a quest. Often times, I see kids who are dazzlers and have amazing portfolio entering the IVY league colleges and then feel they have achieved it. BUT life starts just then. Learning to 'continue to learn', even after leaving the supervision of parents, is an important skill and that can happen only if there exists an internal drive towards such learning.
I also noticed that many have been successfully productive as adults, inspite of not doing much at the younger ages. And a few pg kids have done amazingly well as adults, and sustained the drive that they showed at young ages. It seems to me that the sustenance, hard work, focus, avid/passionate interest that drives one to such a success, also matters along with high intelligence. That internal drive from the kid is the key. The highest IQ scores do not guarantee anything. It definitely does not guarantee happiness to the child. It is their work, interest and their internal motivation that gets them there to the point of self growth, success and happiness, in the areas they think they want to be. So, when my dd produced a unique pattern of multiplication at age 5 and when she found some proofs at 7, which her profs found amazingly unique, it is true that we were absolutely shocked. She never had any formal learning of math, but her mere deep thinking just got her there. Genius and intuition mattered, but so did the time she spent thinking about it. She got and gets plenty of attention for her thinking abilities. But we brought ourselves to ground very quickly, because we wanted her to enjoy these extrapolations to the maximum joy she was seeking from them, without bracketing it and labeling her as a prodigy.
When my ds was spending hours together with his laptop at 5, we thought he was typing away stuffs. But we never expected him to learn Powerpoint to the extent of forming a presentation. We had no idea he had mastered it all until he formed a presentation on math that he had prepared for the science fair the following day, and showed us to print it out. I was humbled. I was amazed at this interest and patience to learn it and create such a wonderful presentation of comparing the pros and cons of Microsoft Word, LyX and WinEdt as the means of scientific documentation. I had not even known that he had dabbled with LyX and WinEdt. From his philosophical questions, his deep interests in sciences, astronomy, the world, his emotional maturity which is light years ahead than his age peers, his unique interests of identifying 400 different fonts, their creators, lives, ability to know and remember things about the world, which we would not expect kid of his age to know, etc, taught me one thing. That a pure passion driven learning, with no expectations or prodding from others, with no artificial ceilings, with no fear of failures, for one's own quest and joy, is a powerful and an amazing thing. And that my kids had this quality by nature. And I needed to preserve that.
I did not want to give importance to my kids' gifts, but more so to their ability to take up interests seriously and work towards them. I wanted to celebrate the joy the got out of such a quest. I became more confident of their paths with time, as well as with their ability to sustain such interests with increasing demands. We talk in-depth things about philosophy and life. We communicate constantly and learn from each other. But the humility that there is more to learn from the world and life is something that really keeps our family growing and learning every day. So, I would think if each of the family lets their children find their passions and interests, instead of expecting them to conform to what works for others or other gifted families, there would be more success in raising gifted kids into gifted and happy adults.
If you have any comments, questions about anything in my blog, kindly drop me a few lines at sravaniacademy at gmail dot com
Thank you.
"Justified computations make scientists understand the world of nature"
Archenia, at age 6
