How can I use this tool in our homeschooling curriculum?

1. Brainstorming. Do your students write short stories, novels, poems, letters, reports, or blogs? Every writing assignment begins with brainstorming. Lists for Writers gets your reluctant writer writing! By scanning various lists like Seven Basic Plots, for example, your writer may be able to hone in on a plot for his story. Developing outlines for the main characters in the story can be as easy as picking random character traits from the various character lists, or browsing for ideas or suggestions and carefully selecting something that fits.
2. Spelling and Vocabulary.Spelling or vocabulary lists could be extracted from the lists for further exploration. Most of the lists do not provide definitions (the phobias list is an exception), so that could be an additional level of study.
3. Geography. Use the lists of U.S. and World cities to match cities to states and countries by quizzing one another.
4. Drawing. Practice your artistic skills by drawing a person and outfitting them from items on the clothing list! This could get crazy! Another interesting drawing exercise: draw a picture utilizing one or more of the colors from the colors list.
5. Nature Study. Find natural occurring objects (plants, animals, minerals) that contain colors from the list of colors. Draw in a nature journal and write a description.

These are just a few ways you can use Lists for Writers in your daily homeschooling life!

Do you have an idea? Please share in the comments section! We love a good brainstorming session!

We’ve been working very hard over here at Gifted Homeschooling on our new startup: Thinkamingo! It’s been a very interesting venture going through the incorporation process, and more importantly, the iOS app development process. We are a family business that designs and develops educational apps for mobile platforms.

Our first app – Lists for Writers – was recently approved (yesterday!) and is now available for purchase in the iTunes App Store. We like it, our kids like it, and we think you will like it, too!

We are very excited to be on this journey as an entrepreneurial family! Yes, indeed, the kids are involved. Are they employees? Not really, but they do a number of tasks including: research and development, marketing, concept brainstorming, content writing, illustration, and testing. They have some other duties that are much less intellectual and creative like tidying up the employee breakroom (the kitchen table), light janitorial work (emptying trash bins), and other miscellaneous tasks related to the mailroom, gadget charging, etc. They have been very involved in the naming, corporate identity, and app idea brainstorming. Nurturing creative and skilled entrepreneurs seems to be the direction we’re going with our school goals.

It’s the real world out there and in here, at our kitchen table. Welcome.

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.”