Monthly Archives: February 2012

Life is a Path, not a Destination

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I want, most of all is for my children to enjoy the NOW, to enjoy the process of learning and becoming, to enjoy each other NOW, and every NOW in the future and to be prepared to meet change as it happens without worrying about the future.

They will encounter things that we could  never dream of. We need to focus on their education in new ways than the educators of our past. Just learning the basic subjects is no longer enough. Being a fast learner, a talented person, or a gifted intellectual is not enough. We need to embrace a path of mastery and creativity. We need to become more adaptable, flexible, adventurous and resourceful. We need to make sure we make connections with each other and teach our children to do the same.

We need to take on the challenge of developing a new mind and to guide our children, who may be much further along that path than we are, to do the same. And, we need to guide them to live a life of balance.

Each family has the ability to more consciously create a family legacy that is of their own choosing and one that will insure the future happiness and fulfillment of everyone in their family.

As we do – we become better people and our children benefit – we can’t lose.

[excerpt from my Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented State Conference presentation: Don't Fence Me In - Mastery, Creativity, and Adventure in the Home Education of Bright Children]

Adventure, some examples

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Nature is a great context for adventure!! For us, one of our long-term adventures is getting out on nature hikes and we’re working our way up to camping. We have managed to do nature hikes for a couple years. We spend the days out at the parks and riding bikes. I think we managed to get past the stage where I thought we were going to have to buy a screen house to stay at the park for the day – to avoid bugs. That almost happened last year.

Camping may be an easy way of life for many of you, but for us it will be a big deal. I camped a lot as a kid and never had a complaint, even when my girl scout camp got hit by severe storms and was flooded. But MANY years later, with children, I feel differently. You get used to a certain level of comfort and security. And, I’m not going to say who, but a couple of us have extremely severe arachnophobia, or really, anything that crawls – phobia. Being from Iowa, then going up north in Minnesota, we can also come down with – big-animal phobia.

We are working our way up to camping for the day, then into the evening. Maybe give it a try at home or at campgrounds near home.

In terms of adventure, dealing with the emotional aspects, takes the most time and attention for all of us. Talking about fear, anxiety, worry, taking risks, being prepared in the face of the unknown, having confidence in yourself and others is an important exercise. Increasingly I take the opportunity to discuss these issues in relation to all of life’s experiences, and what we need to learn and do to cope with these feelings. I refer to the hero’s journey, since our children are into knights, Star Wars, Harry Potter and myths.

Hopefully, it will all serve as a good opportunity to normalize these challenges in life and realize that all of life is an adventure.  Even if you don’t know what is coming next, you can still be confident and know you can survive and thrive. 

Going on small adventures in our lives helps us to experience our feelings in a safer environment, we can practice our responses, discuss them and normalize them. Then, the bigger unexpected events in life will not be quite so overwhelming.

[excerpt from my Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented State Conference presentation: Don't Fence Me In - Mastery, Creativity, and Adventure in the Home Education of Bright Children]

Adventure

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What exactly is Adventure?

Why add adventure – just for fun?  We are not exactly the most adventurous family.  

Adventures allow us to develop and hone the skills we learn in mastery and creativity. It is our real-life classroom.

Why is it important?

We all want our lives to have some adventure – it is the fuel, the motivation of our lives. But, like mastery and creativity, there is much more to it.

Going in: Preparation, Practice
Experiencing :  The unknown,  Risk, Uncertainty, Dealing with chaos 
Coming out: Overcoming fear, Self-confidence

When you are on an adventure you must do a few things:

Going in to an adventure, you must prepare, get ready, plan, research, study, talk to others, learn what you need, predict what your experience will be and what you will need to insure your success

And, you must practice if this adventure requires skills.

While you experiencing your adventure, you must realize that the very nature of an adventure is exploring and experiencing the unknown..

And, wrapped within that unknown package are varying degrees of risk, uncertainty, and dealing with chaos at times.

Coming out of a successful adventure, you have hopefully dealt with overcoming fear, anxiety, nervousness and the feelings that are associated with going into the unknown and taking a risk in an unfamiliar situation. You can see it is important to keep trying and to not give up in the face of challenges.

You also may realize you have more confidence in yourself, to find the resources to succeed, both within yourself and within the situation.

How to actualize?

Adventures do not have to be rock-climbing or hang-gliding or mountain climbing.

Everyone starts at a different point. The point is to keep trying new things, different situations, different people, and create challenges – small or large – even going out to local events and activities, or learning new skills.

Each family member has a different degree of sensitive and risk tolerance. Our adventures have become our greatest opportunities for conversations and discussions about dealing with our feelings of frustration, fear and nervousness, perfectionism, and anxiety as well as our sense of wonder, awe, joy and fun.

[excerpt from my Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented State Conference presentation: Don't Fence Me In - Mastery, Creativity, and Adventure in the Home Education of Bright Children]

Creativity Projects

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Video-production

My kids are writing and producing a video of an advertisement for their favorite toys. They get very excited about this. It was much easier to get my son to write about his Nerf Blaster and how wonderful it is, than to do some of the other writing exercises in their textbook. Writing comes easier, even when a few drafts are needed. They have learned a lot about what commercials are designed to do, how to stage the actions, write the script and direct the video shots. And, it was done with enthusiasm and increasingly more creativity as we went through several versions. I just had to manage my own feelings of the inevitable chaos (from my perspective) when the toys took over our sessions. I have plans to use video more in the future for science and research projects.

Night Story Telling

One of the best creative projects we have ever taken on was started as a way for my kids to calm down before bed. We tell stories at bedtime. When we started, about two years ago, we told stories about what different animals may do with their day. Anything we wanted to share. No big deal, but a chance for my kids to create stories about animals – because that is what they were interested in. It was cute to hear them, sometimes they repeated themselves over and over, sometimes the animals were irritating, but it was a fun time for us together.

A few months into this routine, I started creating the character of Brownie the Bear, who was a marshmallow-eating bear, lived in the woods and stole marshmallows from all the campers. They absolutely loved this character, and now we have been talking about Brownie and all of his friends in the woods for well over a year. The campers loved Brownie so much that they now leave marshmallows for him and his friends to take and the animals leave presents for the campers in return.

He has had lots of adventures,  developed many friendships, the animal community has regular celebrations, they create art from the marshmallows, play tricks on each other and several animals with special powers go to a school of Hogwart’s for animals. In the autumn, the animals celebrate their harvest season of collecting marshmallows from the campers with a giant bonfire to roast them. They keep the marshmallows deep in caves to keep them fresh for the entire winter. They take the extras, dye them different colors, cut off one slice to get them sticky and stick them to the cave walls to make big beautiful mosaics.

Through this storytelling process, I have been able to take our writing lessons and make them come alive, learning what makes a story compelling. They have found toy animals to play the parts, created props and a stage to act out the scenes.

And, I have also used some of the characters in these stories to re-create some of their real-life events with friends or difficult situations to discuss what the animals would do in similar situations. We discuss how they would feel, what they would do and what their options are.  It is easier to discuss because they can externalize the situations using characters they know well and really care about.

[excerpt from my Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented State Conference presentation: Don't Fence Me In - Mastery, Creativity, and Adventure in the Home Education of Bright Children]