Gifted Homeschooling

Stanford’s outstanding EPGY program gets even better! Great news was released today!

EPGY has consistently exceeded our expectations with each of our experiences with them. 

Directly from EPGY program:

Stanford’s online high school adds grades seven, eight and nine

The Education Program for Gifted Youth at Stanford University will be adding three additional grades to its online high school.

Created in 2006 to meet the specific needs of gifted students, the EPGY Online High School (OHS) will add the seventh, eighth and ninth grades for fall 2009. Applications are currently being accepted, and classes for these grades will begin this fall. Full details are available at http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs.

“The addition of these lower grades is particularly important, since this is where the frustration for these students so often begins,” said Cathie Wlaschin of the Malone Family Foundation, which provided an original gift of $3.3 million to launch the high school three years ago, and through the support of which the new grades are being added. The foundation provides scholarship endowments to select U.S. independent secondary schools to fund the education of gifted students with financial need. Through a separate program, the foundation also supports research on gifted education.

In the past three years, the EPGY Online High School has been fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and approved as an online provider by the University of California. Enrollment has grown from 30 students to 135, with students coming from 20 states and nine countries. Seventeen students will be graduating this year, with five entering Stanford University in the fall.

“It had always been our intention to be a full six-year school,” said Patrick Suppes, director and faculty adviser of EPGY and a philosophy professor emeritus at Stanford. “With students of this caliber, it is essential that they be identified early and put to work. The sooner they are fully engaged academically, the better off they will be.”

This week’s theme over at Teachnology is handwriting. There is a video for lefties, and tons of resources for making your own practice sheets. Check out the whole unit here.

Teachnology is a fantastic resource for homeschoolers and supplemental work. Enjoy!

Photo courtesy of Aby Arabit.

The Liberty’s Kids: Complete Series DVD box set that we talked about last month is being released on October 14th. All 40 half-hour episodes and lots of bonuses in one set for less than $50. We have one on order.

Over the weekend we found this great book at Sam’s Club, Eat This Not That! for Kids!. It’s an awesome real-world guide to nutrition for today’s kids. It covers everything from picking the right breakfast cereal to which restaurant / fast food meals are better choices. It’s full of photos of actual products and meals to captivate visual learners.

Our daughter would not put it down and is actually getting a bit annoying criticizing everyone else’s food choices. That’s ok though. She’s had a few units nutrition and the food pyramid, but I don’t think she’s really understood the differences between real world food choices. How could she? Most adults don’t. The book might be a little light on emphasizing complete nutrition, whole grains, etc. especially if you’re really into nutrition, but if you’re a more typical family that doesn’t buy only organic and eats out from time to time, this should be a great fit.

The book is small enough to keep in the car so your gifted kid can drive you nuts every time you break down and hit the fast food drive-through. There is an adult version of the book.

Last year we were struggling with getting Elizabeth going on American History until we found Liberty’s Kids.

Elizabeth had some interest in Egyptians and the middle ages but not much else as far as history. We tried The Complete Book of U.S. History workbook by School Specialty (Sam’s Club special) but she didn’t want to do it. We tried a If You Lived In Colonial Times book but she never even finished reading it. Since we were still hoping to make unschooling work, we didn’t want to force her to work through the workbook.

Then I found Liberty’s Kids, the television show. The premise of the show is that the three kids are working on a newspaper for Benjamin Franklin. The kids report on different events of the American Revolution. The show is full of celebrity voices, the animation is excellent, and it is very captivating for an educational show.

It still airs daily in some markets. Some episodes are available on DVD, but a nice complete DVD set is due out in mid-October 2008.

What I did find though is the Liberty’s Kids computer game. I turned it over to Elizabeth and she played through the entire game over 2-3 days, then went back and did it all over again at least once. Without us even once asking her to do it. In the computer game, the player interviews historical figures and reports on events, even assembling the stories on the page.

There is a Liberty’s Kids website that has additional material and activities for students.

Material World: A Global Family Portrait is an excellent book for sort of a general social studies unit. It explores daily life for an average family from each of 30 countries. Our daughter was just fascinated with the book. One Amazon reviewer mentioned that they used it for their college level course, but it’s more of a coffee table photo book, not a dry textbook.

Five of the family photos are available on the PBS Nova website. Nova’s World in the Balance: The Population Paradox show covers some of the same material but is more concerned with population growth.

DK has a similar book, A Life Like Mine, which is completely focused on the daily life of kids around the world. Our daughter has also read that book repeatedly. One Amazon reviewer did warn that, since it’s produced with UNICEF, it does emphasize the importance of vaccinations and school, which wasn’t acceptable to her. That’s not much of a concern for us, but it is for some home schoolers.

Earlier this year I blogged about Gever Tulley’s TED talk on Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. He really touches on six things though: play with fire, have a pocket knife, throw a spear, take apart appliances, break the DMCA, and drive a car.

We’ve not yet let either of our kids do any of these. Breaking the DMCA is the only one I disagree with and we (or at least I) intend to have the kids do most of these eventually.

I also made my own list of semi-dangerous things we have already done with our kids. Ann’s really not too happy that I let the kids eat berries from the woods.

Last year I blogged about the card game Blink. It’s been an awesome game to play with both of our kids (8 and 4). There’s no reading required, so the 4 year old plays fine. I just deal him a somewhat smaller pile until he legitimately wins his fair share of games. We’ve gotten a lot of set theory / matching exercise out of a little $5 card game that’s sold in every Walmart and Target.

The International Bible Society now has the book introductions from the NIV Study Bible available online. The introductions give the background and an outline for each book of the Bible. That can help understand who the author was, their intended audience, and time frame of each book. Note that most Bible study sources, including the NIV Study Bible, disagree with each other on some points, but this is a decent resource to start with.

Do you get excited when your yo-yo gets tangled? Does your heart leap at the opportunity to rewind a gnarly skein of yarn? Planarity by John Tantalo just might be your dream come true! This incredible game is a great supplement to the study of planar graphs. The object of the game is to “untangle” the nonplanar graph by clicking and dragging the vertices around the playing area.The example here is the opening of a level 15 nonplanar graph. My husband and I are very competitive with this game. We have both gone far into the 20s, and probably will not continue because time is a real factor when you get to the really difficult levels. When you check this out, post a comment with your top level and time! Enjoy!