Category: Books

Book Review: Raising Creative Kids

Posted on by Suki

Raising Creative Kids
by Susan Daniels and Daniel Peters

Susan Daniels and Dan Peters of Summit Center are well-known in the world of gifted psychology. Daniels is co-editor of the wonderful compilation of essays, Living With Intensity, which tackled the joys and pitfalls of raising, educating, and being intense, gifted people.

In this new book, Daniels and Peters move over slightly to feature thoughts on parenting, educating, and nurturing creative kids, a group with a large overlap into the world of intensity. The authors show that understanding and raising highly creative children can be just as much a challenge as raising intense children.

Raising Creative Kids opens by making sure the readers are “on the same page” regarding what creativity is and who has it. The answer, of course, is that everyone can have it, but that our society, especially in our numbers-obsessed schools, works hard to squelch creativity in the name of order and quantifiable learning. Daniels and Peters argue that in this time it is especially important to recognize creativity, whether it expresses itself as award-winning visual art or, perhaps more often, as incessant talking at inappropriate times, inability to focus on rote learning, lack of organizational and scheduling skills, and other hallmarks of the creative soul.

Much of the book centers on defining creativity and offers suggestions on nurturing it. But in the last three chapters, the authors get to the heart of the question: how to parent creative kids, how to teach them organizational skills, and how to prepare them for a successful life in the 21st century.

This part of the book focuses on solving the problems that arise from the “dark side” of the creative personality. Creative kids may be difficult to parent, given that their tendency is to explore rather than follow rules. They often have trouble at school because the creative mind can sometimes coincide with slower development of executive function—the part of the brain that governs decision-making and prioritization. And being highly creative doesn’t necessarily lead to being able to develop that creativity into what the authors call “Big C” creativity—moving from unfocused creativity to focused, purposeful creativity.

This book succeeds in digesting a lot of information from studies and technical journals into a clear, helpful guide for parenting creative kids. Daniels and Peters offer advice on nurturing vs. permissive parenting, teaching organizational skills, and encouraging children to keep developing their creativity in a world that often seems to promote following rules and getting the “right” answer over all else.

Book list for pre-teen gifted readers

Posted on by Suki

Pre-teen gifted readers often run into a problem around the age of ten: as younger children they read everything in children’s literature that they could get their hands on. By the time they reach ten years old, they’re starting to run into roadblocks when looking for appropriate books. Some ten-year-olds are ready to go on to Young Adult fiction, but most aren’t. Young Adult, with its focus on teens’ changing bodies and questioning of their place in the world, is often inappropriate and sometimes very upsetting for “tweens” who have outgrown children’s books but are looking for meaty reading to satisfy their literary cravings.

The list below contains books recommended for this demographic. In general, recommended books will not contain violence described in a visceral way, though books that very sensitive readers might want to avoid are starred. If you have recommendations for this list, please leave them in the comments below.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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Reading list for your gifted young reader

Posted on by Suki

There is a lot of understanding these days about finding appropriate books for emerging readers. An entire new genre has even sprung up for struggling older readers who want something more mature than Amelia Bedelia. But there’s a problem on the other side of the spectrum for kids who read early. It’s not uncommon for an early reader to reach five years old and hit a wall: a lack of books at a higher reading level that are still appropriate for a five-year-old. Even though these children may be able to read Harry Potter, they may not be ready for the Young Adult intensity of the later books in the series.

The following books have been vetted by moms with children in this age group who are voracious readers. Asterisks denote books that may have difficult content for very sensitive readers. If you have additions, please leave them in the comments below. But make sure that the additions follow these rules:

  • No direct violence
  • If deaths of parents, pets, siblings or others are mentioned, please add a note
  • Complex enough reading for a five-year-old reading at a higher level

List:

See also:

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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Birthing a book

Posted on by Suki

People compare writing a book to having a baby, and in many ways its the same. You pour a huge amount of yourself into a book, whether it’s an autobiography or an academic treatise on a rare insect from Guatemala.

But for me, the process of publishing my book, From School to Homeschool, has been in some ways uncomfortably unlike birth.

Suki and book
Me with my little newborn baby!

When you have a baby – those of you who are parents will remember – your body is flooded with happy hormones and despite the fact that your body may hurt and you’re getting very little sleep, you feel elated. You know that your baby is the most beautiful, wonderful baby ever birthed. And people stop you on the street to tell  you how beautiful and wonderful your baby is.

Between the heady days of writing a book and sending it out into the world, however, you lose any hormonal help you may have gotten. The editing process drags on and then you have to start marketing something you can’t even hold in your hands yet. You start to think:

“Is my baby really that beautiful, or did I somehow mislead my publisher?”

“Oh, I really should have given my baby brown eyes instead of blue!”

“Did I forget to give my baby a pleasant smile?”

“Why would anybody like a baby of mine, anyway?”

“How could I have thought that I’d be a good mommy to this baby?” (OK, I think I did think that one once or twice over the last 13 years of parenting, as well!)

The first thing that happened as the paper copies rolled off the press was contacting reviewers. My publisher’s publicity person rightly pointed out to me that they get a better response rate when the writer approaches reviewers she knows or has some sort of relationship with, so I started sending out e-mails. I suspect they were more professionally worded than this, but I remember these e-mails going something like this, “Please like my baby, please don’t treat her badly, please notice her friendly smile and not the big wart on her nose!”

Last week, I awoke with a start in the middle of the night. I realized with great certainty that I had forgotten to mention the website of one of the wonderful movers and shakers of the homeschooling world who agreed to review my book!

What is going to happen when she reads the book and sees that her wonderful website and her wonderful books aren’t mentioned? I thought, my heart pounding. I mentally composed an apologetic e-mail — “I can’t believe we got through the entire editing process without my realizing that I’d forgotten your website!” — and somehow got myself back to sleep.

Days later I remembered that midnight terror, and went to check my electronic copy of the book. There the website was, with appropriately encouraging words about the author’s contributions to the craft of homeschooling.

OK, so my baby is slightly less imperfect than I thought.

Of course, there will be people who don’t like my book, and I’m prepared for that. And there are people who for whatever reason don’t like me, and thus won’t like my book. I suppose I’m a little less prepared for that because I know that I’m way too concerned with whether people like me than I should be. And of course I’m completely prepared for the fact that my book isn’t for everyone: When people whose children are grown or gone, or people who never had any in the first place and are not into gifted education, say that they’re going to buy my book, I’m happy to say, “Only if you want to.” (I personally have a “thing” for owning books by people I know, but what started as one shelf of people that I know has overflown to books stashed all over the house, so perhaps that’s a “thing” I need to give up!)

So yes, publishing a book is like birthing a baby. I am terribly fond of my little orange-and-blue progeny and it was such a thrill to see her (why is she a she? I can’t answer that) after all those months of imagining what she’d look like.

But it’s also a period of growth for me, and growth, as any rapidly stretching teen can tell you, is not always comfortable.

Here’s to books, babies, and personal growth. None of the three is always a welcome force at any given time of a given day, but all are necessary for the continuation of intelligent life in our little corner of the universe.

The wonderful world of Diana Wynne Jones

Posted on by Suki

In the past, my kids and I had read a couple of random selections by the recently deceased British author Diana Wynne Jones, but we had never gone in depth into her large body of work until this summer. We were inspired by our book club, when another mom took a guest turn and announced we were going to be discussing Diana Wynne Jones’s work… all of it! We weren’t required to read all of it, but once we got started, we couldn’t stop.

Enchanted Glass
Enchanted Glass was a late novel for Diana Wynne Jones, offering a new world in which magic is woven into everyday life.

We started with The Enchanted Glass, a wonderful little novel that reads like the great beginning to a long series. Unfortunately, Jones died soon after this novel was released, so no more installments are forthcoming. The characters, however, live on in my mind, and while reading the rest of her books, I am getting a sense of where she might have gone with them.

Right now we’re working through all the books in the Chronicles of Chrestomanci, a group of inter-related novels about storylines that take place in a series of related worlds. Most of the books feature the wonderful and slightly ironic figure of our “contemporary” Chrestomanci, Christopher Chant. (Chrestomanci is the title of a British government position in a world much like ours, so the series features different inhabitants of this job.) We love this Chrestomanci not only because he never fails to deliver as a dapper gentleman who is most focused and dangerous to his foes when he starts to look “vague.” We also love him because we get to know him as a boy, and we sense over and over how his experiences stick with him as he deals with all the magic-wielding children who come his way.

Jones’s most well-known series are probably the books related to Howl’s Moving Castle, which was made into a well received animé film that has, if I remember correctly, very little similarity to the book itself! The books are enjoyable and fanciful, if not Jones’ deepest work.

The interesting thing about Jones’ career is that it never took off in the way that her rabid fans think it should have. She was a steady, respected presence throughout her life, but her books have never inspired lines at midnight outside the book store, or high budget films that become the must-see film for every kid.

Part of the reason for this, I think, is how internal Jones’s books are. Things do happen in the books, but the plot is seldom the focus of the book. Instead, what happens inside the characters—both major and minor characters—is the main focus and the beauty of these books. The kids in these books are desperately trying to hang on amidst events that they have little control over. The adults are flawed and real, only sometimes doing what the kids need them to do.

Another reason the books may not generate the fever of a series like Harry Potter (which owes a lot to Jones’ work) is that she made some major marketing mistakes: She doesn’t have a clear line between good and evil in her books; she doesn’t feature one character as the focus; she doesn’t have a single plot line that keeps readers waiting for the next installment. Instead, her books dip into the lives of groups of characters. She has great respect for her characters, even when they do bad things. She creates characters and worlds so vivid that they live in on the reader’s mind, even when she has gone on to a new world and a new set of characters.

Having now read over half of her books, I can’t recommend them more highly for your kids of any age. They draw in little ones who love the beautiful descriptions. They entertain the kids who like humor and offer enough action and pyrotechnics for kids who crave such things. They help kids understand motives—their own and others. They respect children and adults and all the complex situations we find ourselves in.

For me, Diana Wynne Jones’s books are simply some of the best that you could read with your kids. She has been a fascinating companion to have in our car, inspiring a number of great conversations and ideas.

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