Tag: book review

Book Review: Legendary Learning: The Famous Homeschoolers’ Guide to Self-Directed Excellence

Posted on by Suki

Legendary Learning: The Famous Homeschoolers’ Guide to Self-Directed Excellence
Jamie McMillin
Rivers and Years Publishing, 2012

Great summer reading for homeschooling parents!

Last August, I attended the first ever (that I know about!) online homeschooling conference through The Learning Revolution Project. One of the talks I attended was by homeschooler and author Jamie McMillin, who had researched the lives of famous homeschoolers. I requested a copy of her book and recently unearthed it on my desk. Oh yeah, I said I’d review that book. Ah, the life of an overly busy writer/mother/homeschooler.

legendarylearningI am glad, however, that I finally got around to reading this wonderful book. McMillin shows fine writing skills, impressive research, and insightful analysis of how we homeschoolers can learn by example.

One of the first questions she addresses is one very important to me: why does she choose “famous” homeschoolers rather than people who exhibited other kinds of success? Her justification is probably the best one could offer: we don’t know much about other homeschoolers. McMillin’s homeschoolers—Pearl Buck, Louis Armstrong, Thomas Edison, Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie…—were the subjects of multiple biographies and left detailed paper trails for us to consider. So although she does focus on famous people rather than on the decidedly more real tapestry of people who simply led successful and productive lives, she does a great job framing how she chose her subjects and what she believes we can learn from them.

The book is arranged thematically, with chapters addressing various aspects of life and learning illuminated by examples of famous homeschoolers. McMillin also intersperses small glimpses of her own homeschooling life, a welcome connection to the modern world without making the book too personal. She then offers her own analysis of what successful homeschoolers do well, and how it translates both to day-to-day homeschooling decisions as well as the future success of the homeschooled child.

The subjects McMillin addresses range widely, with colorful and evocative chapter titles to introduce them: That Divine Spark, Wild Intelligence, Go Ahead—Be a Rebel, Passion into Possibility, Attitude is Everything, Clear Grit. For each subject, McMillin first analyzes the concept and how it played out in at least one famous homeschooler’s life. Then she considers how the principles analyzed could relate to homeschooling and offers us real-life examples. She ends each chapter with a bullet list of “take-aways” from the preceding discussion.

I’m not at the point in my homeschooling life where I am looking for nuts & bolts advice, though I am guessing readers in that stage will find this book useful in many ways. What I really love about the book, however, is how it shows that although the modern homeschooling movement is relatively new, and the methods we are employing can sometimes seem radical and lacking in foundation, really our quest is not a new one. McMillin’s famous homeschoolers all achieved success not because they followed the rules that most modern Americans take for granted—stay in school, follow the rules, get good grades, be a high achiever. They achieved success because they followed their passions, didn’t listen to naysayers, were diligent, and knew that they had something to offer the world.

As McMillin’s book makes very clear, that sounds a lot like the contemporary homeschooling movement. And after I read this book, I felt all the more equipped to advocate for our unusual educational choice.

This post is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Blog Hop—click here to read other great blogs about summer reading.

This month, we focus on Summer Reading. Summer gives many of us extra opportunities for reading… the fiction we love but don’t usually have time for, the non-fiction that we wish we had time to study during the year, or the boundless free time to read on the beach, at the cabin, or on the boat… or in your own living room. Don’t miss the special reading (and Lego!) nook, or the struggle some kids have with reading. Summer Reading is more than just a school reading list.

My essential children’s library

Posted on by Suki

School is out this week, and I am thinking toward next week: annual spring cleaning. Our spring cleaning usually happens in the summer and is largely a culling of clothing the kids have outgrown, homeschooling materials we don’t need and will pass on to others, and books.

Yes, my family is part of the rare set of humans who have: a) remodeled their whole upstairs after discussing the need for more bookshelves, and b) bought a house in large part because of the copious bookshelf space in the kitchen.

Despite our feeling that you can never have too many books, when you have kids who love to read, you can have too many books. Books they hated and will never read again, books they bought at their school book fair (hosted by a not-to-be-mentioned publisher of generally cheap and disposable literature), books someone gave them that they will never be interested in.

But there are some books that will stay on our shelves no matter what. I decided to write up a list of these books, the ones I brought with me from childhood as well as the ones we’ve discovered since. My personal list of desert island children’s literature, so to speak.

Personally, I love the old Alice woodcuts and wouldn’t buy a book with modern illustrations!

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

I will admit, this book will always come first for me. I read this book over and over as a child and as a teen. There is nothing else like it in terms of the effect the tale had on our culture, the inventiveness of the language, and the incredible imagination married with observations of the real world.

Harry Potter by J.K.Rowling

This list was inspired a few minutes ago by my standing in front of my son’s bookshelves, musing about how worn out his copies are. He and his sister have read these books to shreds. And the most wonderful thing about these books is that they squeaked in right before the age of i-devices changed children forever. They are perhaps our last, innocent look at childhood before the iPad, the child without Google, the child who has to invent his own games and solve his own problems.

The New Way Things Work by David MacAulay

I wasn’t familiar with MacAulay before a friend bought the original version of this book for my son. This is the book that answers questions about the stuff we use every day in depth and with humor. Really, you could buy any of MacAulay’s books—his books Castle, City, Cathedral, The Way We Work, and many others do the same for more specific subjects. When I was a child we had the Time/Life series of books about the world, and this is like a modern take on those (which don’t make my list because, alas, our kids do have Google and Time/Life seems so quaint now).

The collected works of Dr. Seuss

Go ahead, splurge and get them all. Dr. Seuss was born when Theodor Geisel was issued the challenge of writing a children’s book with only the most common 50 words that a first-grader can read. He wrote The Cat in the Hat. Most of us would have written Dick and Jane Do Something Really Boring! Seuss’s books are so amazing because with so little he creates drama, tension, and irony, something often lacking in children’s early readers. Throw away the Bob books—read Seuss over and over!

The lines between good and bad, dark and light, friend and wild beast are all blurred in Sendak’s work.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Like Seuss, Sendak never worried about corrupting young minds—he knew that young minds love the dark and mysterious parts of life. Like Seuss and MacAulay, the illustrations are also a huge part of the story. Can you imagine someone issuing Where the Wild Things Are with new illustrations? How could any artist improve on Sendak’s dark and silly, scary and cute world?

Books about my part of the world

This, of course, would change with each reader’s location. I think having books set in and about the environment your children are growing up in is a wonderful part of the reading life. When I was a child, I don’t remember a single book covering anything remotely like the place I grew up in. But since I have been raising my children on California’s Central Coast, we have collected both fiction and nonfiction about our area. If you’re a local here, check out my book list of children’s books set in our area. We also have multiple books on redwood forests, a local mushroom guide, several books about the ecology of our seashore, and Tom Killion’s wonderful woodcuts.

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis

I found it fascinating to reread these books as an adult once my kids were ready for them. I had such intense, vivid recollections from the books and had read them multiple times as a child. As adults, both my husband and I found them disappointing, hardly the brilliant tales we remembered. But our children adored them. Just like me, my daughter went through a period where she read and reread them. I guess just as the children can’t go to Narnia once they were grown up, my grown-up self just can’t access the magic anymore. But they clearly still speak to kids.

Little House on the Prairie and sequels by Laura Ingalls Wilder

My adult enjoyment of these books is tempered by what I have read about Wilder and her manipulative daughter. But ignore all that—the Little House series, with all of its distortions and rose-colored glasses, is a deeply important part of American culture. I think all children should read these books, but somehow they seem to be most important to girls of a certain age. I was sure, when I was a girl, that I’d been born into the wrong time. I longed to get up with Laura on icy mornings, stoking up the fire and trudging to the well. Laura has been a trusted friend to American children for so many generations because her stories are so appealing, and so much a part of the history of this country.

My First series by DK

Encyclopedias for the toddler set—these books are wonderful to look at with small children. They are apparently not publishing the one my son loved the most. Simply called My First Word Book, it featured pictures of most of the things that a small child might encounter in daily life, arranged by category. We referred to this book as “the datz book” because whenever he saw something he liked, he would point at it and say “datz!” He did a lot of pointing with these books.

If you’d like to see other book lists I’ve written, click here!

This post is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Blog Hop—click here to read other great blogs about summer reading.

This month, we focus on Summer Reading. Summer gives many of us extra opportunities for reading… the fiction we love but don’t usually have time for, the non-fiction that we wish we had time to study during the year, or the boundless free time to read on the beach, at the cabin, or on the boat… or in your own living room. Don’t miss the special reading (and Lego!) nook, or the struggle some kids have with reading. Summer Reading is more than just a school reading list.

Book Review: Make Your Worrier a Warrior

Posted on by Suki

Make-Your-Worrier-Final-CoverMake Your Worrier a Warrior:
A Guide to Conquering Your Child’s Fears
by Daniel B. Peters, Ph.D.
Great Potential Press, 2014

I don’t have any world-class worriers in my house, so as I started this new book by the author of Raising Creative Kids, Dan Peters, I wondered how much it would apply to my parenting life. But as is always the case with a well-written, thoughtful book, I found plenty of thought-provoking ideas, inspiration, and creative solutions to a wide variety of problems.

The first thing that happened as I was reading the book was that I realized that although I don’t have a world-class worrier, we have often sailed these waters when it came to individual situations that our children faced. Neither is what I’d call a worrier in general, but both have gone through periods of specific fears, avoidance behaviors, and other issues that are covered in this book.

Peters takes a strong stance right from the beginning that worrying and fear in general is something that therapy hasn’t addressed well in the past. He points out that now that we have such a detailed picture of what physically happens with the fear response, we have much stronger and more targeted tools at our disposal.

The first tool he wields is knowledge: His book trains parents to understand what the fear response is and where it comes from. He offers a picture of why fear happens, what physically happens to a child experiencing fear, and why simply identifying the fear and talking about it is not enough. He also details the various diagnoses that our children might receive related to their fears, while cautioning us not to fixate on the diagnosis itself but rather on how to manage the fear reactions. Using examples from his own practice, Peters shows us that no matter where the fears came from in the beginning, they have a common physical expression that can be identified and targeted.

Peters’ method of choice is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which addresses the symptoms of the problem rather than trying to find root causes. The bulk of the book is devoted to detailing what this approach is, how it works, and how families can implement it in their daily lives.

Of all that I appreciate about this book, the greatest is the respect and trust that Peters offers his young patients. The book is not about something that parents can do to their children, but rather a manual on forming a partnership with their children of any age to gain understanding of and control over their fear responses. Peters repeatedly stresses that this approach will offer children useful tools, not just to overcome a specific fear but to gain an understanding of living with their brains and overcoming other obstacles they might face.

[More information and on sale at Great Potential Press]
[Purchase this book on Amazon.com]
[Read an article about taming the worry monster by Dr. Peters]

Book review: Searching for Meaning

Posted on by Suki

Searching for Meaning: Idealism, Bright Minds, Disillusionment, and Hope
by James T. Webb
Great Potential Press

Searching for MeaningDr. Webb’s work has been very important in my life. The day I picked up A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children is the day that I started to learn about my children—and myself. This was the first parenting book I’d read that admitted that children are different, that families are different, and that it’s not only OK to be different—it’s OK to acknowledge that you are different. And it’s not only OK, but also necessary, to know who you and your children are if you are going to get on with the business of living fulfilling lives.

Dr. Webb’s work with gifted children necessarily led him to the next step: what happens when gifted children grow up? In common belief, giftedness = high achievement. So a gifted child is only gifted by virtue of his or her high grades, and once school is over, somehow we all become “the same.” Yes, some of us as adults are achievers, but it doesn’t matter whether we were whiz kids in school or dropouts who made it big later in life—giftedness is not supposed to matter anymore.

What Dr. Webb has noticed, however, is that the brain that makes gifted children more excitable, more prone to being misdiagnosed with disorders, highly sensitive, and socially unusual does not disappear with adulthood. It’s that same brain, but more developed, more in control. The girl that screamed when she went into a room with bright lights becomes the woman who wears tinted glasses and has found a way to avoid working in office buildings. The boy who kept being sent to the principal’s office because he couldn’t sit still when he was excited about what he was learning has become the man who paces his office and talks to himself when he’s solving a difficult problem. We didn’t suddenly stop having a different brain because we grew up; we simply learned to shape a world that fit our needs.

But that ability to shape the world has its limits. Yes, the woman who is sensitive to light can wear tinted glasses, but if she’s sensitive to violence it’s hard for her to avoid knowing about the violence in this world. The man who paces his office has control of his part of the project he’s working on, but he doesn’t have control over the exploitation of the workers who make the computers he programs. We figure out a way to cope, but sometimes coping is not enough. When you have a brain that works on overdrive, it’s not easy to turn it off at your convenience.

Searching for Meaning is not an easy book. I have to admit, it’s not a book I would have picked up while browsing in a book store. Disillusionment? Hm, maybe I should go for something lighter. Existential depression? Gotta go, I’m late for an appointment. Admitting that what made me a “smart kid” is still intrinsically part of how I interact with the world? Not likely. But despite the fact that I would have avoided this book—perhaps because I would have avoided it—I really appreciate having read it through to the end.

The book takes an analytical approach to the problem by first dissecting it. What is a gifted child? What is a gifted adult? Webb devotes ample space to questioning what makes us who we are. He then lays out the base that the rest of the book builds on: Our overexcitabilities lead us to be idealists; our idealism leads us to want to change the world; our attempts to make things better will eventually lead us to realize that there are limits to what we can do; facing our limits can sometimes lead us to question what our lives are worth.

Dr. Webb could have made this a gloomy book, indeed. However, by laying the foundation of why so many bright minds find themselves confronting disillusionment and depression, he is then able to build on this understanding to help us climb back into the light. Using the different points of view of a variety of thinkers through the ages, Dr. Webb shows ways that we can view what we’re experiencing through a new lens. He offers new ways of looking at what might seem to be a bleak landscape, and cautions us against coping mechanisms (anger, narcissism, avoidance) that become destructive even as we think we are protecting ourselves.

Finally, Dr. Webb offers us the challenge to view our idealism and sensitivity as an asset, to find coping mechanisms that improve our lives and the lives of others, and to aim for hope, happiness, and contentment in a world that desperately needs more of all three.

If you think it’s uncomfortable admitting that your child is different and has different needs, magnify that 20-fold to admit that about your adult self. Dr. Webb’s current mission is to remind us that our brains — no matter which type we ended up with — still need TLC once we move into our adult lives. Dr. Webb’s mission is to understand the needs of brains we called “gifted,” but this book takes its place in a greater striving to understand all different aspects of humanity now that we have the tools to do so.

We are all different. We do have our own needs. Dr. Webb’s brave book encourages one segment of “special needs adults” to learn more about caring for their singularly overexcitable brains.

Book review: The Explosive Child

Posted on by Suki

The Explosive Child: A new approach for understanding and parenting easily frustrated, chronically inflexible children
Ross W. Greene, Ph.D.
HarperCollins, 2009

The Explosive Child by Ross Greene has been on my reading list for a long time. I regret that I didn’t get to it earlier, though reading it now, when many of the other difficulties in our household have been ironed out, has been good timing.

Greene, who is a clinical professor of psychiatry, starts with a simple thesis that many families with sensitive, twice-exceptional, ADHD, learning disabled, or emotionally volatile children figure out over time: the usual parenting strategies don’t work with these kids. Many of us have taken a journey in this regard. We start out looking for help from standard parenting manuals, friends with typical kids, or even professionals. They have great ideas, but for some reason our kids are different.

Greene speaks directly to parents who feel like they’ve tried everything, and he points out that most of the solutions we’ve heard about boil down to two approaches. What he calls Plan A is otherwise known as authoritarian parenting; this is the “Because I said so” approach. Greene notes that even milder-sounding terms like “consequences” are a form of Plan A, because they don’t take the child’s point of view into account.

What he calls Plan C is the opposite: just giving in and letting explosive kids get their way. This permissive approach often seems easier in the short term, and Greene acknowledges that sometimes it’s a necessary part of getting through the day. Though most parenting books don’t advocate permissiveness directly, they do often counsel parents to offer understanding and support to their children in the midst of a tantrum, without giving any guidance for addressing the root causes of the behavior, as typically developing children will usually outgrow tantrums without intervention.

Greene’s interest is in helping parents put together a plan that not only addresses the root of the problem but also helps the child learn valuable life skills in the process. Neither Plan A nor Plan C fulfills these criteria, and in fact, both approaches can damage a volatile child’s chance of developing into a healthy functioning adult.

Greene’s Plan B isn’t easy. First of all, he acknowledges that it pushes a lot of common parenting buttons. Most of us harbor deep suspicions about letting badly behaving children “get away with it.” Also, we have immediate goals, such as wishing our children to be polite in public, that Plan B will put off for a more distant time while we work on our own responses to our children’s behavior. And, he admits, Plan B can be hard for our extended community, such grandparents, teachers, and adult friends, to buy into.

But the great thing about this book is its watertight argumentation: no matter what your resistance to moving to this new—difficult—mode of dealing with your child’s explosive behavior, Greene has a thoughtful, empathetic response.

I can’t vouch for the longterm success of Greene’s approach in my own parenting life, as I just read the book and am working slowly to implement changes in my own responses to common situations in our household. But I can say that as I read this book, I kept saying, “yes,” “yes,” “yes,” as Greene outlined the difficulties of raising a volatile child, and solutions that are at once sympathetic, humane, practical, and based on the longterm goal that we all have: raising happy, well-adjusted adults.

Update, 5 years later

I see that I wrote this five years ago. I can now revisit my last paragraph above and unequivocally state that Greene’s approach has been successful in my family and also for me as a teacher. I believe that reading this book changed the path our family was on. My fifteen-year-old is a happy, well-adjusted kid. Yes, sometimes we argue, but in a normal, healthy way. I can’t recommend Greene’s collaborative approach highly enough.

Now available