Will your gifted child ever fit in?
Mine will.
How do I know, you ask?
I know my gifted children will fit in where they belong. And the search for finding where they belong is unlimited because we're unschoolers. By design, the main feature of our homeschool is becoming part of the community and meeting people. This is how we do it…
My twice-exceptional son is my bunny. When he learns, he goes down rabbit holes. His interests are passions. My daughter is the butterfly and is able to flutter around nearly anywhere. She packs her imagination wherever she goes. So I keep this in mind when I plan our excursions.
CREATING OUR OWN EVENTS
Minecraft Monday
The first thing I did to find community for my son was creating Minecraft Monday at the local library. First I checked with the librarians that we could use a part of the children's library to meet. Then I created a Facebook event in our local group and invited people to bring their kids to play Minecraft together. Lastly, I kept the commitment. Every single Monday we go to the library.
We are halfway through our third year! Through this interest-based event, my children have made friends and acquaintances, as have I. Additionally, my children know the librarians, and they know us.
That worked for us—one weekly commitment for which we were responsible.
Gameschool
Now my son has added board games (specifically Magic: the Gathering) to his interests. Using the same principle, I found a local board game store (one that specializes in Magic: the Gathering) and got their permission to host homeschool events in their store. I created a Facebook event in our local group and invited people to bring their kids to play board games together. And I kept the commitment. Every single Wednesday we go to the store and play games.
This is a whole new group of families—separate from the Minecraft Monday crowd. So my kids have made new friends and acquaintances.
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Plus, just as my children regularly talk with librarians at the library, they also hang out with the owner of the store and his employees.
Imaginations on Fire
My daughter is passionate about role-playing. So we created an event for people to show up to role play. We picked a place and time, invited people, and go every single Friday to role play.
Now we host three weekly events! It might seem like a lot to you, but it doesn't feel like a lot to us. These events work because:
- They're easy to get to. I chose days and times that I knew I could manage. Plus, since everyone wants to go, getting packed up and out the door is trivial. Everyone helps.
- They're easy for me to organize. There's no prep. I'm not teaching a class or doing much besides saying, "We're going ___. Who wants to meet us?"
- They're free and easy to attend. People can just show up whenever they want, and the locations are inviting.
- We are reliable. We go every week. We are easy to find. My kids can count on connecting with people and pursuing their passions.
ACCEPTING INVITATIONS TO OTHER EXCURSIONS
I don't do it all by myself. In addition to the events I organize and host, we also participate in community activities offered by others.
Extracurricular Activities
My son plays Dungeons & Dragons, they both do karate, and my daughter attends an art-based enrichment program. My son takes online classes, she goes to Ninja Zone, and he does parkour.
Field Trips
We go to the planetarium, museums, and zoos. We visit National and State Parks. We meet artists at Open Studio tours.
My kids are meeting a HUGE variety of people—not only families who attend the events but also the other people who frequent the library, game store, and playground. Some relationships are sustained, others fleeting. So they are finding where they fit in. And even better than that, we're finding where they shine and where they are celebrated, and that's we're leaning in.
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Julie Schneider
People often underestimate themselves and their contribution to their local communities. Julie creates ways for them to find their everyday awesomeness and make meaningful connections, because everyone deserves to be celebrated for the unique talents that they offer to the world.
Educating her own differently wired children, Julie is deeply immersed in the homeschooling community, where she found the inspiration to tackle two big problems: parent-as-teacher math anxiety and unifying the local homeschool community. She authored the ebook
Boco Math One: Your New Favorite Way to Think about Mathematics
to empower parents to connect with their children through real-life everyday mathematics learning. And she creates regular events for local homeschool families; for children, she hosts three free weekly events and one free quarterly event. For parents, she hosts monthly workshops.
Julie lives in Colorado, where she is surrounded by amazing family and friends. She's an advocate for neurodiversity and an ally of the LGBTQ+ community. She reads a lot and does Kundalini yoga every day (twice on Sundays). She's also an introvert, a writer, and a teacher.
And like many of you, she is a person willing to say, "yes, I will try."
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From The Editor:
Conquering Fears About Your Gifted Children
By Celi Trépanier, MEd
Do you fret about your gifted child because they
- ask a gazillion questions every day, sometimes in just one hour;
- talk incessantly about the topics they are passionate about, overwhelming their peers and you;
- keep you reeling from all their imaginations, investigations, and explanations;
- have trouble sleeping since they can't shift their brain out of overdrive;
- have difficulties in school such as being bored, correcting teachers, and answering every question;
- are twice-exceptional, and schools don’t quite understand how a child can be gifted and have a learning difference;
- have so few real, like-minded friends they can connect with?
- are anxious, intense, emotional, and sensitive?
There are many valid reasons you worry about your gifted child, and you and your angst are not alone. We know raising them, supporting them, helping others understand them, and making sure they receive a challenging education is not a cakewalk. We understand your fears because many of us have conquered our own worries over whether we are enough for our gifted children. GHF offers you information, advice, and support from those who have gone before us on this frequently bumpy journey.
To help relieve some of your fears, read the GHF Journey’s featured article, “Creating Community for Your Gifted Child,” from GHF Writer, Julie Schneider. Julie has been there and done that, and she lays out her roadmap for finding community for her gifted, homeschooled children.
After you have read the GHF Journey, please hop on over to the GHF Dialogue for in-depth articles from leaders in our gifted community. You will discover you are not alone with your concerns, that you and your gifted child may just survive this journey, and you can find all the information and support you need. Make sure you subscribe to both of GHF’s publications.
Editorial Director for GHF
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Conversations of Sustenance
By Claudia L'Amoreaux
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So many mentors have nurtured and sustained me—the gifted therapists, the systems thinkers and second order cyberneticians, the deep ecologists and naturalists, the school founders, the teens I have mentored who have become my peers in time, and the children who have trusted me and grace my life.
I know I’m not unusual in going through much of my early life feeling like an outsider on good days and feeling like a serious weirdo outcast on bad days. When I consider how and when this changed, I think of particular conversations as turning points and certain conversations as sustenance…
Conversations with my fierce, autodidact mother and my supersensitive, peacemaker father sustained me in my earliest years. I am grateful for their loving support. They had good priorities. They lived simply. They loved picnics in the mountains. They’d both lived through hell in their own ways prior to choosing each other as life partners.
I realize now, in retrospect, I had the good fortune that my parents moved with me from the West Coast to Cincinnati, Ohio, motivated by what they’d heard were “very good schools.” I was four at the time. For my mother, the standout feature of my elementary school was the “extraordinary art collection hanging on the walls throughout the school.” What stood out in my mind was the extraordinary cruelty exhibited by a few of my teachers toward a few of my classmates—always boys. Report cards with Cs in conduct and check marks for “lack of self-control” kept the A-student “talkative girls” (self included) a bit more subdued. I went through all of elementary school with this same group of exuberant peers who were too frequently suffering from extreme boredom and whose curiosity and creativity were severely constrained. In second grade, our teacher died midyear, and a few years later, one young friend died of cancer. An enormous absence of conversation hung in the air around these deaths, and we children were left on our own to make of it what we would. This context set me on a quest for alternative approaches to support young people in self-directed and collaborative learning, and life in general.
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GHF Dialogue
GHF Dialogue publishes essays and articles based on quarterly themes. If you’d like to contribute, please read the submission guidelines, where you’ll also find the quarterly themes and deadlines. We’ve intentionally come up with themes that are fairly broad and nonspecific to create space for a variety of ideas and writing styles. We welcome deeply personal essays, research-based articles, and everything in-between.
Click here to learn more,
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GHF Membership
GHF connects all sorts of people who love gifted learners. We offer both family and professional memberships to support and encourage adults working to create new ways of educating gifted learners. Our members homeschool gifted and twice-exceptional kids, run homeschool co-ops and microschools, write to foster understanding of gifted and twice-exceptional learners, mentor students one-on-one, teach online classes, provide services specifically designed to meet the social and emotional needs of gifted and twice-exceptional learners, and more. We’d love for you to join us.
Click here to join now.
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Coffee Chats
Pour yourself a cup of something and take a minute to come meet your GHF Family Committee Chair. Kasi Peters and Pin-pin Wei will host virtual coffee breaks for you to get to know us, as well as other GHF members. This is a chance to voice to what you would like to see or what you have found most helpful about GHF. The virtual coffee breaks will be held on Zoom, so get the app. Don't worry if you can't make the first one. Virtual coffee breaks will occur every 2-3 weeks.
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GHF Press
GHF Press brings you a diversity of highly rated books from some of the most knowledgeable authors and experts on giftedness. We have published books on raising a 2e child, books which provide insight into the world of gifted adults, a how-to on homeschooling your gifted child from a former public school teacher, current insider information on college admissions, and books for support with bullying and the gifted. GHF Press puts the most vibrant information you need about gifted learners and giftedness right in your hands.
Click here to learn more.
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Dumb Kid
by Paul Beljan, PsyD, ABPdN, ABN
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My work with gifted children and adults did not start as a crusade to heal the unidentified gifted child in me, but the work is meaningful to me for many reasons. Too often, gifted children, like me, go unidentified. The unusual behaviors that are normal for gifted children are often misattributed as willfully poor behavior or having one diagnosis or another.
My father was Chief of Surgery at a major medical center, founding dean of a Medical School, President of more than one University, an aerospace medical researcher for NASA, and he wrote numerous research articles and text book chapters. He always told me I was dumb, so I acted dumb. When a parent prescribes a boundary space in which that child is to act in order to gain parental acceptance, the child will act out their prescribed role. I was good at acting dumb. I was always in trouble as a child—always, whether I did something wrong or not. I was a slow reader and acted up in class. My stomach was constantly in knots from guilt and fear of my father’s innate creativity administering punishment with his careful balance of shame and humiliation.
I dropped out of college after one-and-a-half quarters and moved to Miami, Florida. After working as a valet and busing tables for a year, I began to realize the value of an education. I took a twenty-four-hour bus ride home, got a job and an apartment, and enrolled in community college. Attending community college to earn a two-year associate degree in Mental Health Technology was the best decision I have ever made for three major reasons: First, at least at the time, mental health was considered a female-dominated field, and I was told that I would always have a job, as men were needed. Second, with the associate degree I could get a professional job to pay for the rest of my four-year degree (no parental scholarship for this guy) as opposed to simply having two years of college credit. Third, I would have two more years of professional experience than my peers upon graduating with my four-year degree in psychology.
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GCP's students reach for the stars, whether with confidence or unsure, alone or in groups, with assistance or as autodidacts. Teachers, mostly former GHF, provide flexible instruction.
Questions? Thoughts? Let us help!
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Online middle and high school courses with live, weekly webinars for curious learners. Gradeless classrooms foster critical thinking and social connections.
Friends of GHF save 10% with coupon code GHFREADER.
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THE GHF PRESIDENT'S CLUB
For those of you who can give at least $500 we have created a special recognition program where you will be listed on the GHF website and in our monthly newsletter, The GHF Journey, as valued members of the community.
Donations may be kept anonymous.
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ABOUT GHF
GHF connects all sorts of people who love gifted learners. We offer both family and professional memberships to support and encourage adults working to create new ways of educating gifted learners. Our members homeschool gifted and twice-exceptional kids, run homeschool co-ops and microschools, write to foster understanding of gifted and twice-exceptional learners, mentor students one-on-one, teach online classes, provide services specifically designed to meet the social and emotional needs of gifted and twice-exceptional learners, and more. We'd love for you to join us.
GHF is a 501c3 organization
. Please consider supporting our community with your most generous gift today. For more information on our organization, please feel free to contact us at
info@ghflearners.org.
Thank you!
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