Homeschooling Gifted Children

Parents have known for a very long time that homeschooling can be the most effective option for giving their children the best possible education.

Royal Fireworks Press is focused on helping meet the needs of parents who are homeschooling gifted children, on providing stimulating materials for the insufficiently challenged, on providing materials to engage the turned-off, and on providing structured solutions for underachievers. We also have some general books for parents.

Some of our books are well known to homeschoolers while others are used far less than they should be.

Some of our best books are reflective books that every parent should read whether or not he or she is homeschooling. How To Build a Child's Character by Tapping into Your Own is such a book; it almost instantly makes most parents better at raising their children. A good book on parenting girls is Reclaiming the Lives of Gifted Girls; it gives real insight into the forces that keep girls from achieving in our society. Boys Should Be Boys is a useful book for the parents of boys.

Some books deal directly with fostering giftedness such as Jerry Chris' useful Sixty Ways to Assure Success for your Gifted Children.

A few parents really think about teaching, and they can benefit from the books designed to help teachers write language arts curricula or structure learning experiences. Two books by Jerry Chris are designed to help you structure learning experiences in exciting ways- Fifty Ways to Stimulate Low-Ability and Reluctant Learners Vols I & II, which despite the title give you wonderful scenarios for learning experiences.

For sophisticated parents there are Gemini and Pegasus. Gemini lays out education into a series of thinking skills and the behaviors that are associated with them. Pegasus shows how to structure teaching to develop the behaviors you want in your children. Gifted programs around the country have been built on these books, and they can be extraordinarily useful to parents who are concerned about their children's thinking skills.

Most parents simply use our curricula, particularly the Royal Fireworks Language Arts curriculum by Michael Clay Thompson. This extraordinary pedagogic tool will enable you to deliver the highest possible structured language arts instruction to your children. Where possible, we provide the full text of the student manual in the teacher manual, so home schools need only purchase the teacher manual. This does not work for Word Within the Word and Magic Lens , both of which require more intensive testing on the part of the parents. Our solution has been to create low-cost Home School Parent Answer Manuals for Word and Lens; these give the parent a separate book from the student at the same cost as the Teacher Manual. They provide all the answers to the exercises, and they contain every word [and more] about implementation that is in the Teacher Manual.

The tests that are provided in the Home School Parent Answer Manuals are different in content but not in structure from those in the Teacher Manual. This arrangement serves two purposes: first and most importantly it enables parents to test their children and because the tests are in a separate book, student access to them can be restricted. Second, it enables school teachers to use the tests in the Teacher Manual for assessment and for grades that will appear on transcripts without the concern that some parents may obtain the Teacher Manual and thereby give their children an unfair advantage. For this last reason the sale of the Teacher Manual is restricted only to teachers at their school addresses. Parents should know that the volumes they get are different only in the content of the tests; all other information in the Teacher Manual is in the Parent Manual.

Parents using the Royal Fireworks Language Arts curriculum by Michael Clay Thompson should purchase both student and teacher copies of the appropriate Practice Books. The Practice Books are an excellent guide to how well their children are doing and where they should focus attention for improvement. The Practice Books are inexpensive—like the Parent Manuals for Word and Magic Lens—and are an extremely helpful and motivational resource if used on a regular basis.

Homeschooling parents should be aware that although the Royal Fireworks Language Arts Curriculum by Michael Clay Thompson is intended for very gifted students in a school setting, it can be used with most children in a home setting. This is because homeschooling is so productive in developing and nurturing the abilities of children. For children who would be in grades 3 through 4, it is generally better to begin at the Island Level. For those who would be in grade 5, the Town Level is often the better choice, and to those in grade 6, the Voyage Level is often the best level to start. For children whose entry-point is later, the recommended starting point is Word Within a Word Volume 1, Magic Lens 1, Poetry and Humanity, 4Practice1, and Essay Voyage. Where appropriate, the use of Essay Voyage can be abbreviated and the child moved on to Advanced Academic Writing Volume 1.

There are special Homeschool Packages to show which Michael Clay Thompson books complement each other at each level to get the full benefit from the curriculum and include the Parent Answer manuals where appropriate. The Basic Packages include the books needed by your child if you are on a particularly limited budget. The Complete Packages are what they say: the full set. Ordering either will save money, even on the Online Price.

The Problemoids Math Challenge Program is very useful for parents of children who are gifted in math. It is designed for 4th through 6th grades; its purpose is to teach children the problem-solving strategies identified by Polya when he was at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton with Albert Einstein. There is an inexpensive problem book for the student. The teacher/parent manual contains the solutions to the problems as well as the answers. Homeschoolers need both the student book and the teacher manual. We have kept the cost as low as possible so homeschoolers can take advantage of this program.

When we grew up, we experienced the huge benefit of parents willing to play thinking skills games with us. We believe that these games are an important in a world where the life of the mind is valued. We offer several books to give parents games to play with their children that are particularly useful for homeschooling gifted children. Among them are Educational Play: Mathematics and Educational Play: Language Arts. Both books provide a menu of games and activities, many of which are appropriate for time spent in the car or at the dinner table. A much more structured set of games and activities is to be found in the Muscles of the Mind Program, where all four books are designed to develop a wide range of thinking skills.

Homeschooling parents are also encouraged to look carefully at our novels. We publish books that we want our children to read and we are very careful about the language, situations, behavior, and values of our books. Good literature does not necessitate swearing, drug use, sex, violence, and flagrantly disrespectful behavior. We like very much the historical novels which give children an imaginative insight into people, places, and situations they will study in far less exciting texts. We also like the mysteries and other problem-solving novels that encourage children to develop a spirit of being pro-active about problems.

Homeschoolers' Curriculum

View the full e-catalog of Michael Clay Thompson's Curriculum for homeschoolers

Download the full e-catalog of Michael Clay Thompson's Curriculum for homeschoolers

Discussion Group

Homeschoolers, teachers and parents are invited to join the new Yahoo! Group for users of Michael Clay Thompson's Language Arts series.