“We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that child is someone today.”

- Stacia Tauscher

**originally posted in 2006 **

We were hanging out with our homeschooling friends one afternoon and my daughter Jacqueline was sitting on one of the picnic tables, finishing a story (Princess Barbie) she had started a few days before.

I was having a conversation with another homeschooling mom and she asked what Jacqueline was doing. When I told her she said
something to the effect of “Maybe she’ll be a writer when she grows up”. To which I replied, “She already is a writer”. She paused (and you could see the light bulb going off) as she thought about that, and said “Yes! She is a writer”.

That little shift in thinking has been very helpful to me in unschooling my kids. What she’s doing now is valid and important, not because it may help her when she becomes an adult, not because she may choose that as her career, but because it brings her joy and makes her happy now, right now. She is not an “adult in the making”. She’s exactly where she should be.

So without further ado, here is Jacqueline’s story. She is already working on her second one, which I’ll post when she’d done.

Princess Barbie
by Jacqueline Anne (a 7 year old unschooler)
2006

I love being a princess.” Said Barbie.

Barbie’s tutor came in and said “Princess the queen sent for you”. “Where is she?” said Barbie. “In the throne room” said Ken. Barbie went to the Throne room.
There the queen sat. “Come my dear” said the queen. Barbie hugged the queen. Barbie was surprise to see royal page.

Soon Barbie was heading back to her room when she heard a cry. It was the royal page yelling invader!
“Invader?” asked the princess.
“Yes” said the royal page. “We must hide” said royal page.
So they hid. The invaders lost. They were safe.
The Royal page was nice.

The End.

Related posts

• Origami (2)
• Learning Math Concepts Without School (5)
• Courier Journal Unschooling Article (0)
• What Is Unschooling? (4)
• Unschooling In The News (3)

We picked this origami book up at the library, dug out a pack of paper that we bought on clearance and Billy sat down with the girls to try it out. None of them had ever done it before so they chose an easy one to start with, which happened to be a frog. Billy’s in the black one, Jacqueline’s is green and Shawna’s is blue.

They’re trying to see whose frog can hop the farthest. Looks like Shawna won.

Related posts

• Courier Journal Unschooling Article (0)
• What Is Unschooling? (4)
• U-N-S-C-H-O-O-L (2)
• My Five Best Homeschooling Tips (23)
• My Daughter, The Writer (8)

This highly opinionated former teacher and original thinker spent the last half of his life challenging widely accepted classroom practices. The author of 10 books that concentrate on early child development and education, Holt is widely considered the father of the modern-day homeschooling movement because he grew to believe that schools stifle the learning process. In this, his final book, compiled by colleagues from drafts, letters, and magazine essays written by Holt before he died in 1985, he strings together his own observations and philosophies to show how young children can be encouraged to learn everything from reading and math to music and science.(more…)

Related posts

• Unschooling In The News (3)
• Anne Ohman: Making Connections (2)
• My Daughter, The Writer (8)
• What Is Unschooling? (4)
• Valerie Fitzenreiter And Laurie Chancey Interview (2)

She and her daughter Laurie (who was pursuing her PhD in sociology at the time of the interview) were interviewed together by the American Public Media. Soon after, Valerie was invited back to reply to readers comments, including a teacher who thinks we should keep our children in school and work harder to make the public school system better.

Here are the links to both interviews. I highly recommend taking time to listen to both of them if you’re interested in learning more about unschooling.

School? NOT
Unschooling Revisited

Related posts

• Unschooling In The News (3)
• Anne Ohman: Making Connections (2)
• What Is, And Isn’t Unschooling (18)
• What Is Unschooling? (4)
• Unschooling is… (0)

Kids Take School Into Their Own Hands:
Some Home-School Families Are Opting for a New Approach to Curriculum; Unschooling
BY Claire Scheumann

From stock whips to ballet, Dungeons and Dragons to NASA, some Berkeley students say they are studying subjects they would not have access to in a traditional setting by pursuing a new kind of education called “unschooling.”

Teaching children at home has a long history, but in the past decade, families have been engaging in a learning philosophy which allows students to dictate the curriculum.

Sam Fuller, 12, joined the 10 percent of home-schooled students participating in unschooling nationally when he began his education seven years ago.

“We kind of have phases of learning,” said Sam, who lives with his family on the border between Albany and Berkeley. “We learn what we are interested in.”

Sam’s mother, Pam Tellew, was a teacher before she got the idea of unschooling at a teaching retreat shortly after Sam was born. Sam’s 7-year-old brother Nicky has also begun unschooling.

Unschooled students do not engage in traditional classroom learning, instead pursuing a hands-on approach in museums and outdoor settings.

Skeptics say unschooling may not expose students to necessary subject matter because they follow no required curriculum.

“I want educators to make decisions about what kids need to learn,” said school board member Shirley Issel. “If you only open the doors that interest them at first, they may have a limited range of options available to them when they want to go on to higher education and employment.”

In California, there are approximately 10,000 families a year that file requests declaring themselves as a private school, which allows them to specialize curriculum.

Parents of home-schooled students in Berkeley say their choice was not determined by the quality of the city’s public schools. Rather, an interest in a variety of cultural and learning resources contributed to their choice.

In the Berkeley Unified School District, 129 students participate in the independent study program, which allows them to meet with teachers for only 30 minutes per week, pursuing other interests in the meantime.

District officials say they do not know the number of students in the city who opt for home schooling.

Advocates for unschooling insist the approach creates greater student engagement, leading to deeper learning than traditional methods.

“Personally, my sons outgrew what the public schools could offer them,” said Livermore parent Cyndy McClay, a representative of the California Homeschool Network. “I loved my neighborhood schools, but my kids didn’t always fit there.”

Results of studies examining homeschooled students show, on average, they score 15 to 30 percentile points above public school students, said home education researcher Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute.

There is limited research on the long-term success of home-schooled adults, but studies have shown that the students tend to earn their college degrees at a slightly accelerated rate and become more engaged in leadership throughout their adult life than their public school counterparts, Ray said.

One study showed that achievement did not differ between home-schooled students who learn in a traditional setting and unschooled students, Ray said.

In addition, home-schooling typically does not impair students’ social skills, he said.

Sam Fuller has become involved in the Junior Ranger program, which provides outdoor education for children ages 9 to 12, and a fair organized by families with home-schooled students to raise money for charity.

Related posts

• Anne Ohman: Making Connections (2)
• Valerie Fitzenreiter And Laurie Chancey Interview (2)
• My Daughter, The Writer (8)
• Unschooling Article From Education Week (0)
• Learning All The Time (11)

Every parent would happily give up ever scolding, punishing or threatening if she only knew how to ensure that her toddler/child/teen would thrive and act responsibly without such painful measures. Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves by Naomi Aldort is the answer to this universal wish. It is not about gentle ways to control a child, but about a way of being and of understanding a child so she/he can be the best of herself, not because she fears you, but because she wants to…(more…)

Related posts

• Naomi Aldort (5)
• Nurturing Your Teenager’s Soul (0)
• Getting Rid Of Arbitrary Limits (0)
• Unschooling Freedom (0)
• Everyday Blessings – The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting (1)

My daughter Jacqueline (age 7) is self taught on the subject of space/the universe. She’s interested in learning about the universe, because she’s interested in the universe, and that interest has taken her in many directions.

I’ve been re-reading Guerrilla Learning by Grace Llewellyn and I wanted to share this:

“Real learning requires meaning. Meaningless information can be memorized and repeated, but it’s not learning. For information to have meaning, there must be meaningful context for the information. That’s why most people, unless they are really good at absorbing and retaining meaningless data, forget most of what they learned in school.

In school, subjects are artificially separated from each other. It’s as if schools believe that if you give kids one tree at a time, year after year, they will save them up and make a forest out of them. School can sap kids interest in learning, confuse them with so many meaningless “trees” that it may take years to recover and begin to see the “forest” again.

School can simply eat up so much of their time that there’s none left for the real learning, for spontaneous exploration or free play. Instead of discovering their unique gifts and talents, many learn to see themselves as “disabled” if they don’t keep up with the traditional school systems standards of measurement.”

I love the tree analogy. School did that to my older two and it would have done that to Jacqueline, had I not taken her out. When I see my kids learning, really learning, it makes the artificialness of school much more obvious to me.

Related posts

• What Is, And Isn’t Unschooling (18)
• What Is Unschooling? (4)
• Valerie Fitzenreiter And Laurie Chancey Interview (2)
• Unschooling is… (0)
• Unschooling In The News (3)

Myla & Jon Kabat-Zinn are parents to three grown children. Jon is the founder and director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and is the author of Wherever You Go, There You Are (another book I highly recommend).

So what exactly is mindful parenting?

Jon had this to say in an interview, “Mindfulness, which lies at the heart of Buddhist meditation, means moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness. It’s cultivated by refining our capacity to pay attention, intentionally, in the present moment, and then sustaining that attention over time. It means becoming more in touch with our life as it is unfolding.

Parenting through mindfulness has the potential to penetrate past surface appearances and behaviors and allow us to see our children as they truly are, so we can act with some degree of wisdom and compassion. The more we are able to keep in mind the intrinsic wholeness and beauty of our children especially when it’s difficult to see the more our ability to be mindful deepens”

In the back of the book, they list 12 exercises for mindful parenting. The two that have helped me change my perspective the most are: “Try to imagine the world from your child’s point of view, purposefully letting go of your own. Do this everyday for at least a few moments to remind you of who this child is and what he or she faces in the world.” The other one that helps keep my focus is “Imagine how you appear and sound from your child’s point of view, i.e., having you as a parent today, in this moment. How might this modify how you carry yourself in your body and in space, how you speak, what you say. How do you want to relate to your child in this moment”?

I use these as tools with my three children and it allows me to see past their behavior. It helps when I’m getting angry and feel like yelling, to see myself, as they see me. Facing that and looking at it honestly, can be scary sometimes but putting yourself in your child’s place, will show you the world in a whole new way.

This insightful book approaches parenting from a Zen Buddhist position, but will benefit anyone who wishes to learn and maintain gentle/mindful parenting methods, regardless of religious beliefs. If you’re looking for a typical “kids versus parents” book, this is not one of them. Borrow it from the library and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

If you’re interested in purchasing this beautiful book, please click above to be taken to amazon.com’s secured server. Thanks!

Related posts

• Valerie Fitzenreiter And Laurie Chancey Interview (2)
• Unschooling In The News (3)
• Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves (10)
• Anne Ohman: Making Connections (2)
• What Is, And Isn’t Unschooling (18)

In our unschooling family, learning is nothing that’s separated, categorized, planned, judged, graded, or forced. It’s just a natural, joyful part of all of our lives.

Because real, natural learning is in the living. It’s in the observing, the questioning, the examining, the pondering, the analyzing, the watching, the reading, the DO-ing, the living, the breathing, the loving, the Joy.

Real learning happens when our children make real connections that have meaning in their real lives. Real learning is not what we were told it was. It’s necessary for us, as unschooling parents, to make a shift in our perception of what constitutes learning. That’s sometimes difficult for parents to do, because our old definition of education and learning is so deeply ingrained in our society and in us.

So in order to make that shift, we first just need get out our erasers and clear away the old crap ~ because real learning is buried under that school definition of learning. Erase that away, and then shift your focus.

Focus on that connection with your True Self and focus on allowing your children the freedom to connect with their True Selves. Focus on that second connection ~ connecting with each other. Focus on living. Living joyfully. Live a full, rich, connected life with your children.
Focus on the Joy and allow your children to focus on the Joy. They are constantly and joyfully and effortlessly making connections within their own minds and hearts. Their body of knowledge that they possess within themselves has the chance to grow every day. What does that mean? It means with unschooling, they’re learning every day!

We also need to erase away the harmful fallacy that learning is something that can be forced. Real learning is nothing that can be forced upon another person. The connections have to originate within themselves. It has to come from that first connection. Otherwise, it’s not real learning. It’s temporarily memorizing something in order to pass the test.

John Holt once said in an interview, “Children are interested in the world, as far as they are able to get into contact with it.”

That’s our job. To put before our children as much of the world as we can.

Related posts

• Unschooling In The News (3)
• John Holt Interview (0)
• Valerie Fitzenreiter And Laurie Chancey Interview (2)
• Unschooling Freedom (0)
• Unschooling Article From Education Week (0)

We’re hosting our annual NOT back to school pool party on the first day of school, which is Monday, August 24. Please being your bathing suit, towel and flip flops. You might also want to bring a bagged lunch for you and your family, although we’ll supply snacks, drinks and ices.

This pool party is open to ALL homeschoolers and we love meeting new people so feel free to invite any homeschooling families that you think would enjoy coming. The more the merrier!

Day/Date: Monday, August 24, 2009
Time: 11:00 AM-4:00 PM
Bring: Bathing suit, flip flops, towel, sunscreen, lunch
We will supply: drinks, snacks, ices
Hosted By: Joanne, Billy, Shawna & Jacqueline
Place:  (leave a comment if you need the address)
Phone: (leave a comment if you need the phone number)
facebook: http://facebook.com/joannegreco
An RSVP is not necessary, but would be appreciated.

See you there!!