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Sallie Schaaf Borrink

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You are here: Home / Archives for Home Education / Homeschooling a Creative Child

Homeschooling a Creative Child

Caroline’s Recent Creative Projects

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August 12, 2022 | Sallie Borrink
4 Comments
View Full Post with Embedded ContentCaroline’s Recent Creative Projects

I haven’t done a post about some of Caroline’s creative projects in four years. Four! The last one was Caroline’s Creative Endeavors from July 2018.

Like many creative kids, Caroline goes through phases with different types of creativity. For her, these things are hobbies and not something she wants to make into a career. She doesn’t like being under pressure to create with a deadline. So she’ll have weeks where she spends a lot of her free time creating and then other weeks when she doesn’t do much. (If you’ve read my post Understanding Why Your Creative Child Is Lazy, you understand what I’m talking about.)

I asked Caroline if she wanted me to share some of her favorite things she’s been doing and she gave me several. I hope you enjoy them!

Painting With Posca Pens

Caroline enjoys using Posca Pens.

Here are some canvas bags she worked on recently.

and

Drawing With Watercolor Dual Tip Markers

Caroline works sometimes with these markers. Here is the same set on Amazon.

This is a gift she wrapped for a friend with plain white paper (doubled layered) and then decorated. It was so cute in person!

Digital Art With Apple Procreate

Caroline drew this on her iPad with her Apple Pencil. She said this is similar to her Among Us avatar.

Beaded Necklaces and Bracelets

Caroline loves making these while watching videos. LOL! She’s made lots for friends and family members according to their individual interests. This is just a small sampling.

She usually buys her pony beads at Joann’s and Michaels. She especially likes Joann’s because you can buy the individual colors or a big variety bag. She uses primarily black stretchy elastic that she gets at Meijer for the base. Here are pony beads on Amazon that are similar.

Bracelets

The six across the top all coordinate and they are really pretty in person. The clear beads actually have glitter/sparkle in them.

Up close

And more! She said the top right corner one is her favorite.

Necklaces

Up close

More

And more! The bottom one is one of my favorites.

So that’s a little update from the creative child in my home. I hope you enjoyed it!

Category: Homeschooling a Creative Child, Our Cozy Family Life4 Comments

Making Peace With Your Creative Child’s Clutter

Post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure statement.

June 3, 2019 | Sallie Borrink
4 Comments
View Full Post with Embedded ContentMaking Peace With Your Creative Child’s Clutter

One of my blogging friends, Jimmie, wrote What My (Messy) Artist Daughter Has Taught Me. I totally got that post as I had been thinking about the struggles of being a neat person who likes everything in its place when your child isn’t anything like that. It sounds like my Caroline and Jimmie’s Emma are a lot alike. Creative, empathetic, and funny describe Caroline for sure.

Jimmie wrote:

But Emma is not bothered by messes. In fact, she says she likes to have all of her possessions visible (on the desk or on the floor) so she can know where everything is.

That sound you hear? That’s my head exploding because I cannot relate to this way of thinking at all. But I see it in my home on a daily basis.

An Attitude Adjustment for Mom

Although “neat freak” is a bit too strong to describe me, quasi-obsessively orderly would not be. I am relentless about picking up each day. I cannot go to bed if there are messes in every room. I find it depressing to get up to things left undone from the day before. The early years of motherhood, with its endless array of paraphernalia, was an especially tough go for me in that respect.

One area where I failed time and again as a mother was voicing my frustration, displeasure, and otherwise crankiness regarding Caroline’s messy room. She didn’t see it as messy, but it drove me nuts.

Worse yet, I would be especially frustrated when it was time for her to go to bed and somehow we hadn’t gotten it picked up earlier in the evening. Far too many times **I** put a damper on bedtime because I was frustrated with the state of her room. Part of my frustration was felt toward myself for not getting on it earlier and part of it was directed at Caroline for not being naturally wired to be neat in the way I am.

At some point, I realized that this was my problem, not hers.

This became especially true when she expressed the idea that I expected perfection in her room. I had never said that or even implied it. Even when her room was “picked up,” it never approached what I would consider anything close to perfection. But somehow that was the expectation she was carrying in her mind. What seems “normal” and “picked up” to me somehow became an expectation of “perfection” to her. This was especially grievous to me because I AM a recovering perfectionist. The last thing I want to do is burden her with those kinds of expectations whether they were accurate or not.

Safety Standards for Creative Clutter

My standard line each evening became, “Would you please make sure no one will trip over anything in the night?” I’ve boiled it down to a safety issue and that’s it. There was no pushback after that and she obligingly complies almost all of the time.

Caroline’s combination of being artistic and not naturally wired to organize means her room can be, um, very busy. So once a week or so, David and I do a fifteen to thirty minute “room rescue” with her to keep it under control. We don’t make her pick everything up or put everything away. We respect her preferences. But we make sure any spots that are simply getting to be too much get dealt with.

Letting Creative Child Be Herself

I’ve read other bloggers say that if your kids can’t keep their room picked up on their own each day that they have too much stuff and the answer is to give away or get rid of 75% of it. I don’t agree. We’re not going to give away all her toys or punish her for having a room that isn’t picked up all the time to my preference. It’s her room and she’s old enough to be allowed some say in what it looks like. If she wants the contents of her room on display so she can easily find them, then that’s really her choice. As long as it doesn’t pose a health or safety risk, I choose to let her be herself.

Category: Homeschooling a Creative ChildTag: Clutter, Home Organization4 Comments

Homeschooling A Creative Child For The Future

Post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure statement.

March 7, 2019 | Sallie Borrink
1 Comment
View Full Post with Embedded ContentHomeschooling A Creative Child For The Future

David knew when he was still quite young that he would be an artist or architect of some kind. I knew from an early age that I was good with words and wanted to be a writer (but ended up a teacher for reasons of economic practicality).

So two creative people met and married and – surprise! – we have a child who is also very creative. We are a highly creative family and even earn a living through our creativity. Over the years we’ve learned to structure our daily life around our creativity.

Observing Caroline’s creativity and being married to an artist who is gifted in ways I am not has been a catalyst for thinking more deeply about what it means to be creative. It has also led me to think about how I should best prepare my creative child for a future that we cannot begin to predict or really even begin to imagine.

Creativity And The Future

A short search on Google regarding creative people and creative thinkers yields many articles that demonstrate the value of creative thinking and creativity moving forward:

  • Creativity Is The Skill Of The Future from Forbes
  • 8 Reasons Why Creatives Will Rule The World from Fast Company
  • Creative thinking vital for future industries from Financial Review
  • The Future of Human Work Is Imagination, Creativity, and Strategy from Harvard Business Review

So creativity meshed with problem solving skills will be increasingly important and potentially open doors for people with unique sets of skills.

What do I do with that knowledge?

Homeschooling a Creative Child for the Future

Best Schooling Option For A Creative Child

There are a number of reasons we homeschool, but Caroline’s creative bent is a significant factor now which I didn’t fully understand when we started. It’s interesting that the first finding presented in How To Inspire the Next Generation of Creative Thinkers and Innovators states:

Realize that Out of School time tends to be more inspiring and powerful to lead to a life of creativity than school time. Innovators tend to take responsibility for their own learning when they are on their own time.

In other words, homeschooling is probably the best option for creative kids.

I’m guessing it is the best option by a mile. Between commuting to and from school, being in school, and doing homework, traditionally schooled creative kids have very little out-of-school time they can spend being creative.

Children who go to school don’t have their own time. The school owns them. I mean, really. It does, especially as they get older and the academic demands become greater. Let’s be honest. There is virtually no way a creative child can have massive amounts of time for the creative process that I wrote about in Understanding Why Your Creative Child is Lazy. The flexibility that homeschooling offers is clearly superior for creative kids if we look at it from the time factor as well as the ability to be creative during the parts of the day that work best for the child’s particular wiring (morning, afternoon, evening, middle of the night).

So I do believe based on reading and my own parenting experience so far that homeschooling is the best educational choice for a creative child.

How To Homeschool A Creative Child

How do I homeschool my creative child? I’ve written so many posts that touch on that subject that I finally created a category called Homeschooling a Creative Child.

Since I’ve written extensively about that topic already, I will leave that particular topic to what I’ve already said up to this point.

Creative Kids Going To College

As I think about the future and how to best get my daughter from now to high school graduation (and beyond), the questions related to college always come up. We also talk about this topic quite a bit in our home because my husband has been an adjunct instructor at an art and design school for the past thirteen years so he sees first-hand what is happening with many creative kids.

I think this is one of the biggest areas where the choices families make can have the potential to make or break their creative child’s life. As in their entire life. If I allowed it, these questions could keep me up at night.

  • Should my creative child go to college?
  • Should I encourage my creative child get a degree in a creative field?
  • Should my creative child take on college debt?

Those are questions every parent is grappling with given the exorbitant cost of a college education right now. But I think they are even more challenging if you have a child who is gifted in a way that will, more often than not, lead to a lower paying job.

This includes many creative kids. There are many reasons for the lower pay, but being forced to basically work in a world-wide marketplace that drives down wages for creatives is a big part of that. I don’t see that changing at this point so I believe this is a huge factor to consider.

If I had to answer these questions right now when Caroline is just starting middle school, I would answer them like this:

  • Should my creative child go to college? Maybe or even probably.
  • Should I encourage my creative child get a degree in a creative field? Maybe.
  • Should my creative child take on college debt? Absolutely not.

If there is one question I feel confident answering, it is that a child who is studying in a creative field should absolutely not take on debt to do so.

Believe me, I’m well aware of the cost of college and that many families cannot afford to pay for it. But we are aware of way too many kids who have massive amounts of college debt and a degree in a creative field that opens very few doors to anything that pays much at all.

Unless someone is going into something like Medical Illustration that pays well and is in high demand, there is no way I would encourage a creative young adult to take on debt. Even then, I would still not encourage it but it at least offers better paying job prospects.

Unless something substantially changes, the creative field is rarely going to be lucrative. Many creatives end up self-employed anyway and with the rise of contract labor and the gig economy, I don’t see massive numbers of high-paying, corporate jobs developing for creatives.

And, at the risk of being terribly politically incorrect, there is no way a woman who really hopes to be a stay-at-home mother someday should take on massive amounts of debt getting a degree in a creative field.

Now, could things change based on what those articles above said? Sure. If a creative child is able to combine that creativity with another high level skill (such as with Medical Illustration), then there could be many more opportunities.

But many creative kids would be better off starting at a community college and growing their own side hustle at the same time. Another option would be to become certified in something that has much greater likelihood of offering steady employment such as a skill in the medical field. Not something that will take lots of expensive education, but something that requires training and is fairly accessible when it comes to jobs. Any skill that cannot be outsourced gives a creative person options.

Preparing Creative Kids For The Future

Creative kids have so much to bring to the world. Unfortunately most of the time the world doesn’t offer substantial monetary value for what they bring. For that reason, parents of creative kids will have to be creative themselves as they guide their child toward life beyond high school.

Category: Homeschooling a Creative Child1 Comment
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I’m Sallie, Christian wife, mother, and homeschooler. Welcome to my cozy corner of the world. Our little family lives a quiet simple life of home education, self-employment, and laughter. I share what I've learned to help others navigate this world with truth and beauty. Please start here. ♥ 

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