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Keeping Gifted Children Motivated and Learning

Sage Advice Gifted Education

Thursday, 30 January 2025

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It's a challenge to homeschool gifted children. They eat up curricula and books almost as fast as you can get them, they want deeper and deeper content, and they crave intelligent conversation about all they are learning. In public schools, it's pretty common for a gifted child to burn out. Either they are not challenged enough and fall into an uninterested stupor, or they strive to become the best in the class with an unholy inner drive. We homeschoolers can do better by continually monitoring our expectations and adjusting the challenge level as needed. Your job: keep curriculum challenging, but not overwhelming.

Making sure the curriculum is academically appropriate and socially appropriate at the same time is extremely difficult! If you add too little challenge, the kids become bored and may "hate school" and become low functioning adults. Provide too much challenge, and they may burn out, and the love of learning can be snuffed out. A balancing act for the ages.

Losing Balance

We live in a workaholic culture, but we are trying to raise children who function well in a family, not just rise to the top of the corporate ladder. Teach them to find balance in their personal life now and lead by example. While keeping them challenged, make sure they have enough time to relax with family, share meals together, and have unscheduled free time that all adults need. If they are constantly behind in their schoolwork or staying up late to complete assignments on a regular basis, that may be a sign they are being overchallenged or overworked.

Keeping Gifted Children Motivated and Learning

The constant pressure to succeed and excel can become overwhelming. With too much pressure, gifted children may choose laziness over extreme achievement. Strive for the middle ground. Don't forget that learning can be super fun! Your child may want to work on academics for up to 8 hours a day, much like an adult might work that long on the job. But if your child works longer than that, then the pain of their giftedness may overwhelm the benefits of learning.

Be sure your child has appropriate curriculum for their ability and their emotional age and be sure they are working hard but not working too long. Mental health days and breaks are encouraged to keep their fire going!

Keeping Balance

To counteract all the negative burnout, the overworking or the under challenging, I've got some proven strategies for you to implement.
Allow student-led learning as much as possible. Allow them to speed through the curriculum at their pace of interest, even if it means you will need to hunt for more material sooner than expected. You can also slow their ravenous consumption of material by introducing projects or intricate problems to solve. If you do assign a project, ensure it isn't just busy work, but actually deepens an area of interest or stretches the student in some way. A presentation, a performance, or even a script for a podcast could put their knowledge to use. Pinterest is FULL of great ideas for high school projects – beyond just worksheets and papers. Another way to slow down their accelerated pace is to explore different points of view on a particular topic. If you are exploring history through a strictly Christian lens, consider learning about the same time period through a non-religious or conflicting religious worldview, then discuss the differences. Understanding both sides of an issue or view will help your child deepen their understanding of their own worldview.

With all the knowledge constantly being added to their young brains, students may come to you with big questions or with a desire to share in the advanced knowledge they have. Engage in this curious questioning as much as possible. It might be as simple as posing theoretical questions to spark curiosity, or it may be discussing the actual nitty-gritty details of what they are learning (if it's upper mathematics, best of luck to you!). If you find their questions go beyond your grasp, see if you can find a peer or mentor they can learn from. If your child is interested in the human body and it's workings, maybe a nurse or nursing student could be just the person to come alongside and fascinate them with collegiate-level fun facts or actually answer some of their impossible questions. This also gives your student someone to look up to and a potential goal to achieve. Win-win.

I loved this list of "Seven Realities for Successful Transition from Adolescence to Young Adulthood" from BrainyChild.com

Reality # 1: Remember that the real basics go beyond reading, writing and arithmetic. Critical thinking, resilience, creativity, systems thinking, and empathy is crucial.
Reality #2: You can be good at something you don't enjoy doing. It doesn't have to be your career.
Reality #3: You can be good at some things that are unpopular among your friends. If that is your calling, chase it.
Reality #4: Life is not a race to see who can get to the end the fastest. There is so much value in the day to day.
Reality #5: You have the ability to ask questions which should have right answers, but don't. The world can be a confusing place. Not everything will be as clear as a math problem.
Reality #6: It's never too late to be what you might have been. Don't let anyone tell you it is.
Reality #7: A life's career is not a life sentence. Change at any time.

Once gifted children grow up, they are faced with adulthood. Gifted adults may also be prone to severe workplace burnout. Teaching your child to handle their abilities while balancing free time to enjoy life is a key to helping them become thriving adults.

Learn more about gifted education by checking out these two resources.

Gifted Education Strategies for Every Child (Online Parent Training)

Parents with gifted children face unique challenges in their homeschool. The BEST NEWS is that when you learn about your gifted children and how to support them, it can help you homeschool all of your children! In this class, you will learn specific strategies that you can use with ALL of your children - coming from a mom who understands the challenges of homeschooling gifted children. This hour and fifteen minute long class will go over specific strategies, curriculum recommendations, and hard-won tips and tricks and is taught by Lee Binz, the founder of The HomeScholar and mother to a gifted child. Gifted Education Strategies for Every Child (Online Training)

Gifted Education Strategies for Every Child: Homeschool Secrets for Success

This is not just another "gifted child book." This book covers eight different strategies for teaching smart homeschool students, including concepts like acceleration, compacting, enriching, and specialization. Homeschooling gifted children also brings questions about when to graduate them, whether to utilize community college, and whether Ivy League schools would be appropriate. While the strategies in this book were developed for gifted children, they will work for every child and help every family get the most out of their homeschool! Gifted Education Strategies for Every Child: Homeschool Secrets for Success