I believe in you. I believe in the God who works with you and confirms His word with miracles, signs, and wonders! This leads us to the third key, the Hope Key - may your child wake up every morning embracing their future full of hope.
"You are on a treasure hunt to discover your child’s gifts and talents." – Brian Sheppard, a hero, and TikTok influencer.
Key #3 - Every learning challenge has a Kingdom key.
These challenges are met and overcome with the keys of the Kingdom! It is not a "make it or break it" factor if your child has a diagnosis, or the symptoms of a diagnosis. Nor is it a factor if your child struggles with attention, focus, concentration, or in a subject area. There are strategies, curriculums, therapies, tutors, and coaches, for every season of your child’s life. If you match what your child learns to how they learn, it will help them overcome challenging areas and soar in the area of their gifting.
The first responders’ minds have discovered their gifts and their wills have chosen to use these gifts to continue to train and hone their attention, focus, and concentration skills on who, what, when, and where to focus. Their passion drives them to improve and train to save the lives of others. Their ‘why’ helps them have the courage they need to get through the hard days. They are heroes. “A person of distinguished valor, (intrepidity), bold courage, or enterprise in danger; a great, illustrious (well known, respected, and admired for past achievements), extraordinary person; as a hero in learning,” Noah Webster. Your child is a champion. “A champion is a hero, a brave warrior,” boldly facing their challenges and discovering their genius.
“Genius is the peculiar structure of mind, which is given by nature to an individual, or that disposition or bent of mind which is peculiar to every man, and which qualifies him for a particular employment; a particular natural talent or aptitude of mind for a particular study or course of life; as a genius for history, for poetry or painting”. – Noah Webster.
Your child, fashioned and formed from the clay, carrying God’s breath, has a God-given disposition toward any of the “seven mountains”: arts & entertainment, business, family, government, media, church, education, and every combination in between. Focus on your child’s gifts! Give them grace, and use prudence and wisdom in their areas of challenge. Here are the gifts of the most common learning disabilities:
People running successful businesses are three hundred times more likely to have ADHD. *The gift of ADD/ADHD symptoms.
NASA hires 50% dyslexic because they are gifted in problem-solving, 3dThinking, and spatial orientation. *The gift of dyslexic symptoms.
The genetic markers for autism and genius are the same just in varying degrees. Dr Temple Grandin spoke to Silicon Valley inventors, entrepreneurs, and geniuses as the room broke out into applause. *The gift of the autism spectrum.
People who have been trained in job skills, mentored in job skills, and shadowed in job training programs, have successfully found and kept jobs regardless of their IQ and functioning. *The gift of a developmental delay.
"Autism is a very big continuum that goes from very severe, where the child remains nonverbal—all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers. And I actually feel at home here because there's a lot of autism genetics here." – Dr. Temple Grandin, The World Needs All Kinds of Minds, TED2010.
Now you know why labels don’t stick in my world! I see a child’s gifts, the family’s gifts, and the gift in the way a child processes new information, how their memory works, and their academic skill level. I partner with teachers and parents to design a curriculum roadmap to match how a child learns to what they learn. I use their gifts to pull up their challenges. Not every child is wired to be the best in every subject. Not every traditional teacher knows how to work with a gifted brain. Pray and match your child’s challenges with a kingdom, coach, tutor, or teacher. Don’t be surprised if your child’s best teacher is you!
I encourage you to allow your child to meet the minimum requirements in their class subjects of challenge and accelerate their classes in the subjects of their giftings. For example, a child who may struggle in math, yet is gifted in English may take consumer math and AP English. God knows the potential of your child. He knows the end from the beginning. Ask HIM. Partner with the Holy Spirit to design your curriculum in each season! This is Kingdom Education. Whatever skills your child is lacking doesn’t have to disable them, it can highlight where you need to instruct and train them in the way that they should go.
I’m going to share with you another story of hope...
At a homeschool convention, I met another special family. The teenage son was particularly impressive. In the parking lot, I watched him be intuitive, load and unload a truck for his family business, and then supervise his younger siblings, while amidst 2,500 people. He was incredibly kind and personable. He was gifted. Yet, at the time, he was unable to read fluently and had challenges with math, writing, memory, focus, attention, concentration, listening, and following directions. Pay attention to what your kids do well. I was given the opportunity to work with him. This young man excelled in a crowd of background noise while performing some of the same skill sets that he failed miserably when I assessed him one-on-one in a quiet environment. Unbeknownst to the family, they held the kingdom key. They had already made the impossible possible. The questions I explored with the Holy Spirit were: What did his family do? How did they train him to help run the family business with background noise? They came into my learning center and camps and were eager to learn. They gleaned from every curriculum, strategy, and spoken, and unspoken lesson.
With this eldest son, there was no formal diagnosis, which made it easier because it's a process to break off the lies and the mindsets that come from receiving a diagnosis. Some of the lies I tear down with the Lord are: something is wrong with them, that they are disabled, unable to learn, and that they have a ‘learning disability life sentence.’ Thankfully, in this case, we didn’t have to battle those lies. Instead of a negative label, I was able to call out the gifts as I saw them and follow My Curriculum Roadmap.
Following my Curriculum Roadmap, mom had brought her son to a level of success. The only thing that remained to work on was the ability to focus. Pay attention to your child. Gifting resides inside those kids who need to be in constant motion. The antidote for this child was allowing him to hang from the beam and do pull-ups, wall sits and push-ups, squats, planks, and burpees in between subjects. A year later, Dad, as a basketball coach, grabbed me in the hall between classes and told me that his son just wasn’t getting basketball. I painted a word picture of how his son learned new information, and how his memory worked. I told him the story of my baseball player. This gave him a testimony of hope. Three years later his son went on to college with a full basketball scholarship! All those beam pull-ups, squats, and planks may not have made a lot of sense at the moment, but looking back,
they showed his genius; he was preparing for his calling. For my families with kids who are in motion, this child needed deep tactile, sensory stimulation at his joints and learned how to use it to self-regulate and control his attention, focus, and concentration. For my families with kids in whom learning doesn’t come easy, he went on to college! In college, he told his mom that he had discovered a learning center that helped him figure out his new classes, “Mom, it was a room full of Karen’s”, he found his tribe, a place that championed him and didn’t just tolerate him and built a bridge from his high school academics skills to college so that he could keep his basketball scholarship. There is a kingdom key for every challenge in every season.
You may say to yourself, ‘Yes, my child is a gift, but how do I get my ‘gift’ to do the math when he would rather build a Lego set, and when given a choice would rather take out the trash or pick up the poo in the yard than sit down and be tortured with a math book?’ How do I get my ‘gift’ to sit down and read when she is spinning and dancing and would rather tell me every detail of the last movie she watched? I’m glad you asked! Are you ready for the next key?
This key is going to take a lot of patience in the line of duty. You are on the battlefield of mind and body. It is going to take your child’s spirit and soul, partnering with the Holy Spirit. It will require your intentional planning, and maybe advice from a naturopath, functional medicine, doctor, therapist, or coach or two to overcome the next challenge. This leads us to the fourth key, the Love Key - may you overflow with love from the throne above. May your child splash in the overflow of God’s love and yours. Fourth Key Link: https://www.atap-edu.com/post/keys-to-learning-at-genius-when-learning-doesn-t-come-easy-key-4-of-5 Did you miss the Second Key? Here's the Second Key Link: https://www.atap-edu.com/post/keys-to-learning-at-genius-when-learning-doesn-t-come-easy-part-2-of-4 Additional Free Resources https://www.atap-edu.com/post/keys-to-learning-at-genius-when-learning-doesn-t-come-easy-resource-links