Unschooling - Page 52

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My Unschoolers’ End-of-the-Year Reports

My husband Andy is a primary school teacher, and twice a year he has to write school reports for all his children. For a couple of weeks, we see nothing of him except his back, as he sits in front of his computer, trying to condense six months’ learning and progress for each child into a limited number of characters.  “Writing my end-of-the-year school reports is easy,” I say to…
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When Will I Use All This Maths, Mum?

My older children all learnt maths in a formal manner, using a text book course. All three started the advanced maths course and all three dropped out partway through, complaining they hated it and were no good at maths.“When are we ever going to use all this maths, Mum?”“But you have to do maths!” I insisted. Isn’t it an essential of education? As a compromise, my children agreed to do the general…
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What to Do When Strewing is Rejected

Recently I found all kinds of things to strew in front of Charlotte.  I came across a website and DVD series that has an episode about a man who settled on the uninhabited Cocos Islands, later making himself king over the workers of his coconut plantation. His family ruled for 150 years before Australia brought that rule to an end. Doesn’t that sound interesting?p  I discovered a TV program about…
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Encouraging Kids to Become Independent Learners

Many years ago, at a homeschooling picnic, I met a family who had a baby a little less than a year old. I watched her as we sat on a picnic rug together, eating our sandwiches. The little girl reached for a knife. It was rather big and sharp. I looked at the mother and father, expecting them to take it off their child. But they didn’t make a move.…
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A Real Maths Learning Moment

Sometimes real life maths turns up when I least expect it. Maths learning moments suddenly appear. And if I take advantage of these moments, some wonderful real maths learning can happen… Yesterday the girls and I were watching art history videos on the Kahn Academy website. Before we moved off the site, I did a bit of exploring and found something else that looked very interesting: computer science. There were…
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How Much Is Enough?

Once upon a time I used to worry about how much learning my children were doing each day. “Can we go now, Mum? Have we done enough school work for today?” How much is ‘enough’? I used to look at my records book. Did it have enough written in it? I used to look at the clock? Was there time to fit something else into the day? I rarely looked…
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Some Bits and Pieces…

The other day I was looking at a letter Gemma-Rose had written to a friend. It was long and detailed and her spelling was almost perfect. “When did you learn to spell so well?” I asked. Gemma-Rose shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. I do read a lot, you know. Maybe I remember what the words look like.” Well, she must have read many ‘ought’ and ‘aught’ words because I…
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Nurturing Independent Learners

To me, unschoolers are independent learners. At least mine are. What further can I say? Because one sentence isn’t much of an article, I decided to do a little research to see what other people have to say about this topic.  I did some Googling, but before I found what I was looking for, I got side-tracked by an article written by an author who believes it is irresponsible for…
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Suzie Andres Chats about Unschooling

Last week, Suzie Andres emailed: “Just wanted to let you know that tomorrow…  I’ll be on Judy Dudich’s blog/talk radio show to speak about unschooling…”  So I tuned in, eager to hear what Suzie had to say. I was also eager to hear Suzie’s voice. Although we are friends, we have never met. I soon realised I am pronouncing Suzie’s surname all wrong and, although we Aussies have two different…
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Having the Confidence to Ignore the Opinions of Others

Gemma-Rose is eight years old, and she still can’t tell the time. Well, that’s not quite true. If I put my watch in front of her and say, “What’s the time?” she’ll screw up her face and look unhappy for a while, and then eventually she’ll give me the correct answer. But her calculating will be accompanied by a lot of huffing and puffing, and the answer won’t arrive instantly.Now…
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Giving My Unschoolers a Maths Test

I had this brilliant idea. Well, I thought it was a pretty good idea until this morning. It was all to do with maths. How do you prove your children are covering the required maths syllabus, and achieving the necessary outcomes, when they don’t use a formal maths program? I’ve been thinking about this for a while. My husband is a school teacher. Every year his year 3 and 5…
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