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 particular curriculum is an extraordinary pedagogic tool, and it will enable you to deliver the highest possible structured language arts instruction to your children. Where it is possible, we provide the full text of the student manual in the teacher manual, so home schools need only purchase the teacher manual. In some cases that is not possible, and in those we provide low-cost tests and answer manuals for home school parents. We sell the teacher manuals for Word within the Word and Magic Lens only to schools; they are not sold to parents; the homeschool alternative is far less expensive.

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.