Category Archives: Don’t Fence Me In

Resources for Mastery ~ Creativity ~ Adventure

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]

The pressure of being gifted

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Tamara Fisher is a K-12 gifted education specialist for a school district located on an Indian reservation in northwestern Montana and president-elect of the Montana Association of Gifted and Talented Education. With Karen Isaacson, she is also co-author of Intelligent Life in the Classroom: Smart Kids and Their Teachers. Her hobbies include drawing, hiking, fourwheeling, and building houses. (She lives in a house she built herself.) In this blog, Unwrapping the Gifted, Fisher discusses news and developments in the gifted education community and offers advice for teachers on working with gifted students.

She concludes the article with “Take a moment this week to tell a gifted child in your life that you don’t expect him to be perfect. Take a moment this week to tell a gifted child in your life that you know being a gifted kid isn’t the cakewalk others seem to think it is. Take a moment this week to tell a gifted child in your life that her intellectual growth and hard work ethic are far more important than perfect marks, even if it means a B in a challenging class. What we assume that others know about our views of them can be out-of-sync with reality. Tell them you know they’re only human. You very well could be someone’s hero for saying it.”

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Gifted Children Get Mixed Messages

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Mixed Messages
Image by The Loopweaver via Flickr

Our society thinks it is wonderful to reward athletes, musicians, actors, and artists.  Entire industiries spend billions of dollars on these fields.  But what about the intellectually gifted?  They get mixed messages.

It’s good to be smart . . . as long as you’re not too smart.  Too smart makes you a nerd, an egghead, and a teacher-pleaser.  It can even make you a target for suspicion, resentment, and open hostility.  

It’s good to get high grades . . as long as you don’t talk about them.  That’s bragging, and besides, you might injure someone else’s self-esteem.  

It’s good to score high on tests . . as long as you keep this fact to yourself, or within your small circle of similarly brainy friends. When Gifted Kids Don’t Have All the Answers, Jim Delisle, Ph.D., & Judy Galbraith, M.A. (2002).

It seems the only time it is “cool” to look smart is when you are applying for college.  So many services help students score higher on tests and write superior essays to get admitted to desireable colleges.  Everyone seems to brag when they get into a prestigious school, but what about the rest of the time?  Is being smart only desireable when it can get you what you want?

It’s the mixed messages and skewed perceptions of giftedness that make the label more of a burden than a blessing.  It’s the insensitive, uninformed comments from teachers, peers, and/or parents that make gifted kids want to downplay, deny, or hide their giftedness. When Gifted Kids Don’t Have All the Answers, Jim Delisle, Ph.D., & Judy Galbraith, M.A. (2002).

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