Category: Homeschooling Types

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Fostering Creative Play in 2e Homeschooling

Fostering Creative Play in 2e Homeschooling, yellowreadis.com Images: Paintings, a skirt, stamps, a bear

When planning out a homeschool plan, it can be easy to think of creating and making things as nice extra, but creative play is also essential for brain development, as it helps foster problem solving ability as well as a whole host of other great things, like out of the box thinking, adaptability, and flexibility, as well as enhancing the ability to retain ideas. Which for our family, means it is bumped up pretty high on the ‘must-do’ list.

Due to the imaginational OEs often associated with gifted/2e kids, some kids ooze creativity and imagination and everything becomes an elaborate story or creation. Anything in their reach becomes part of their imaginative world. Other kids (particularly those with some types of special needs, like ASD), might also exhibit large amounts of imagination and creativity, but it will come out in more unusual ways that might be easy to dismiss or miss. Having lots of different ways for kids to express their ideas, with materials ready to hand for practical creations can really help with spontaneous creative play.

But an adult’s idea of creative play doesn’t always match up with the way kids like to create and explore. Which can be a challenge for parents and other adults. But letting go of expectations of finished products or following the instructions can have huge benefits for everyone! Creativity can come in many forms and for my family, fostering my kids ideas has been far more useful than trying to bend their ideas to fit preconceived ideas about creative play.

So, how to foster creativity with gifted or twice exceptional kids? Here are some ideas we have used to foster creativity in our home:
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Unconventional Learning;

We’re a geeky kind of family. With me being a mathematician and my DH an engineer, it would be hard to not be geeky. We’re also not going to score high on the ‘doing things conventionally’ test, if one of those existed. But sometimes, just sometimes, the paths my kids take to learn are so unconventional that they leave me with a feeling of stunned awe (and a little bit of ‘where in the sweet unicorns on a pegasus did that come from‘?).

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Unschooling Ain’t The Boogie Man

Unschooling Ain't The Boogie Man, yellowreadis.com Image: Kids lying on pier playing in water

Every now and then, usually when news is a little slow, prominent papers like to do little fluff pieces on the edges of the educational world. One week might be about lambasting ‘pushy parents,’. Another week an angry remonstrance on the horrors of alternative education.

Personally, I find it deeply amusing that, depending on the flavour of the month, our little family can be both academically pushing and overly restrictive tiger-parents, and laissez-faire, academically neglectful parents at the same time.

In July, it was Mamamia’s turn to have-a-go at the punch-the-alternative-education bandwagon.

The topic this time around? Unschooling.

So what is unschooling? And why does it raise so many hackles?
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Frugal Apartment 2e Homeschooling

There are many ways we have changed our lifestyle in order to be able to homeschool our children. Adjusting to the reality of a one-income family involved rethinking many of our assumptions about what we needed and what we could do without. It’s an ongoing process as our needs have changed over time. Some of our decisions have been lifestyle based, and some have been more focused on how we create an environment that is conductive to learning. So today I’d like to step through some of the things we do to try and keep us on the correct side of the ledger.

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Playing to the Positives

It’s very easy to fall into the habit of only thinking about the negatives. I do it. In fact, it runs in my family – anxiety is a fact of life for more than one generation. But today, I want to talk about the positives. It’s easy to talk about the positives and negatives of my family’s special needs, and it is also easy to talk about the negatives of giftedness. It’s even marginally socially acceptable. But today I’m breaking the mould. I am going to talk about the positives of being a gifted family. Because without talking about those ‘oh wow!‘ moments, it’s hard to understand why being gifted is so different from the norm. Today I’m being brave. So here we go. Continue reading “Playing to the Positives”