Episode 81: Homeschooling the Gifted or High Performing Learner

By: Homeschool.com with Jamie Gaddy

Episode Info

Join Jamie as she interviews Kimberly Langen, a highly educated and gifted educator who started Spirit of Math in 1994 to challenge learners to think differently!

Kimberly has developed an alternative way to helping gifted and high performing learners stay motivated and learn mathematics in ways that align with their particular style of thinking. This podcast was very enlightening and if you have a gifted or high-performing learner you’ll want to listen in. Kim shares a great many practical tips on how to homeschool and keep your learners motivated.

One of my key takeaways was that mathematics needs to be taught in 4 steps:

1 Drill to build automaticity

2 Core Content including topics and spiral learning for younger children

3 Problem Solving in real world application that allows students to use reasoning and logic

4 Collaborative Group Work that elevated thinking, let them talk about it out loud it will stretch them to new reasoning

And something else I learned, in case you were wondering what the difference was between a gifted learner and a high performing learner:

1 Gifted Learner is a student classified as gifted by demonstrating a high level of intellectual ability.

2 High Performing learner is a learner that is simply very motivated to learn!

Don’t forget that it is also important for these learners to learn from failure. Learning from failure often brings about a new level of logical reasoning that wasn’t accessible before.

If you have a gifted or high performing learner and are feeling challenged on how to homeschool them reach out to Spirit of Math. They have regional classes as well as online options for homeschool students.

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