Do You Know What’s at the End of Our Road?

“Shoes on!’ I shout. “Grab a jumper. Do we need sunscreen?” Soon we’re ready. The girls and I are off on an outing. “I’m going to record some video,” I say, holding my camera aloft. “Nancy wants to see where…

Irreplaceable Unschool Dogs and Kids

People often have favourite breeds of dogs, don’t they? Maybe they love greyhounds like a couple living in a nearby town who dress their trio of thin dogs in bright-striped pyjamas to keep them warm on below-zero days. Or they…

How We Can Trust Kids and Dogs

We look up from our cameras to see two lean and muscular dogs racing towards us. They grin and circle around us before disappearing along the bush track.  A tall man appears. He pushes his long curly hair behind his…

Latest

Could Ebooks Save My Unschool Blog?

The other day, I logged into my blog hosting account to find out when my next payment is due and how much it will be. When I saw the bill due later this year, I gulped and said to my husband, “Do we want to spend so much money on a site that’s often slow or offline because of a problem? Do we have that much money? Perhaps it’s time to delete my blog.” Andy reminded me that my blog…

My List of Brilliant Unschooling Blogs

Remember when blogging was the thing to do? We all created blogs instead of social media accounts. We shared our lives, writing our stories, filling our sidebars with photos of our kids, sometimes naming them, frequently hiding their identities under pseudonyms like Princess and Tiger. We followed each other’s blogs. When a new name and face appeared in our followers widget, we grinned. Someone new wanted to read our posts! We rushed to read each other’s offerings before leaving lively…

How Unschoolers Can Deal with Questions and Sceptics

My mother-in-law visited us for the birth of our son, Thomas. After he died and we’d buried him in his tiny white casket, Andy’s mother asked me if we wanted more children. As I replied, “Oh, yes!”, my mother-in-law’s face dropped into a disapproving frown. “She thinks we already have enough kids,” I thought as my defence hackles rose. But that wasn’t it. I’d misunderstood. In S3E3 of The Ladies Fixing the World podcast, How Unschoolers Can Deal with Questions…

How Kids Need Something Better Than Perfect Lives

If it were possible, would you give your kids a perfect life? Or do they need something better? Sitting on my faded blue chair in our back garden, clad in my pjs, at 7 o’clock this morning, savouring the relatively cool air that has now disappeared, I thought about how we put so much effort into trying to give our kids a perfect life. We want to bring them up in beautiful, calm, peaceful homes filled with every possible resource.…

When Our Unschooling Days Turn Grey

Life has felt grey for a while. The fog of tiredness hangs over me, trapping me in my own isolated world. Occasionally, after a reasonable sleep, the grey recedes, revealing bright delights and joys, and I think about how blessed I am to be living my life. My spirits lift. I rejoin the bigger world, thinking about how I can contribute to it. But on the whole, the fog swirls around, and I feel stuck. And sometimes desperate. It’s hard…

Unschooling: Making the Right Choices

Years ago, when life was overwhelming, and I was looking for yet another way to homeschool my kids, I was tempted to unschool. I thought if we were unschoolers, we could do whatever we liked, and if we didn’t want to do anything, that would be okay. Because unschooling is about freedom, isn’t it? We are free to choose what we do, so we can choose to do nothing at all. I discovered that unschooling doesn’t work that way. Yes,…

Unschooling: Coping With the Unexpected

I used to think I could control my life. To achieve a perfect life, all I had to do was organise everything well, including my kids. What is a perfect life? My perfect life vision included a graduated row of good-looking and well-behaved children. I wanted people to admire my family and home, saying, “Sue is such a good mother! Have you seen her home? It’s spotless. How does Sue do it?” I imagined my children growing up into well-rounded…

Resources for Unschoolers

Strolling towards the shopping centre, I spy an older man with three hand-reared brightly coloured parrots. A few wide-eyed kids are gathered around him, and as I watch, he transfers a parrot to one of their shoulders, where it bounces lightly upon its feet, nuzzling a little ear. The child grins, hardly daring to move. The children have questions which the man is happy to answer. Who doesn’t like sharing their passions with curious people? We often look for resources…
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My Unschooling Books

Parents and Kids

When in Doubt, Just Love

Last Wednesday, I pushed our living room sofa out of position, exposing a stretch of plain duck-egg blue wall. I placed a chair and…

The Ladies Fixing the World

Unschooling Is Carried by Conversations

Dinner tables, car rides, bedtime chats, and café corners are the real places where unschooling lives and grows. Conversations—often unscheduled, informal, and unplanned—can become the central structure of a learning life. Gathering at the Dinner Table In our house, we never met for breakfast or lunch. Those were meals where people ate what, where and when they liked. But we…

Unschooling: How Do We Know They’re Learning?

There are loads of unschooling questions we could ask about learning: How do we know unschooling kids are learning? Should they be learning particular things? Is there knowledge that all kids need? Are our unschooled kids learning enough? Can they get behind? Should we just trust our kids are learning? But what if we have doubts? Or what if we…

How Unschooling Doesn’t Guarantee a Fairytale Life

Yesterday evening, like all Sunday evenings, my kids who live locally came to dinner. Six of us gathered around our dining room table, savouring a meal cooked by my husband while enjoying the usual end-of-the-week lively catch-up conversation. There was a time when we dreamed that all our children would buy houses on the same street as our family home.…

Christian unschooling

Love or Fear? What Guides Our Lives?

There are so many things we could fear. We might be too afraid to send our kids to school if we listen to the loud voices telling us how bad traditional education is. We might choose homeschooling because of that fear. If we decide to homeschool, we’re still not safe. Fears could follow us. We might be too afraid to…

Losing Time

I’ve been reading a book called A Time to Die by Nicholas Diat, who visited eight monasteries to talk to the monks about the experience of death. Here’s something that caught my attention: One monk described how he cares for the old and sick, and how he has to guard against doing things in a routine way, trying to complete…
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