The Extraordinary Ordinary Things of Life

I’m at Thomas’ wake. I have his memory box on my knee, and I take out a few photos and pass them to a friend. “He was a chubby baby!” she exclaims. I reply, “He wasn’t really. Those photos were…

So How Do You Feel On a Monday Morning?

When I was a child, I’d awake on a Monday morning with a pain in my stomach. I was always reluctant to get out of bed and face the week. Five days of school stretched out ahead, and the weekend…

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…

Aiming for Love, Not Perfection

 I had a vision…  By the age of 18 all my children were going to be perfectly brought up and perfectly educated. I wanted them to fly off into the world without a problem. I was going to sit back…

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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 ways of saying St Therese, my friends in the US…

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 this situation might shock some people. Can’t all school kids…

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 students have to sit the dreaded NAPLAN test. (National Assessment…

How the Girls Are Going to Write Novels in Only One Month

 The girls can’t wait. They’ve been planning for weeks. There’s only seven days to go…. until… NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. I heard about this yearly online event on Kari’s blog, Overflow, last year, when she announced her intention to write a 50 000 word novel in one month. Write a novel in only one month?  Could I do that? No way. But then Suzie Andres said she was going to take up the NaNoWriMo challenge too.…

Tired and Cranky and Lacking Enthusiasm

I was awake nice and early this morning. Too early. I lay awake at 4 am thinking… How will I be able to run if I don’t get more sleep? How will I get through the day? But of course, sleep never happens when we most want it. So I got up this morning, a Monday morning, and I didn’t experience that wonderful Monday morning feeling I was telling you about a couple of weeks ago.  Maybe you came to…

Resolving to Go on More Adventures

This afternoon I had to drive to town to buy a few essentials: cheese and biscuits, wine and coke. Andy and I are off to our parish’s trivia event tonight, and we need to take along a few things to nibble while we exercise our brains trying to answer the questions.  I wanted to make the most of the 40 minute car journey to town and back, so I decided to turn the routine shopping trip into an adventure.  “Who’d…

Love and Physics

This morning I asked Charlotte what she was planning to do today. “I might have a look at a periodic table video,” she replied. More chemistry. My third daughter is certainly a keen unschooling chemist. “Why don’t you broaden your horizons,” I suggested. “You could try some physics. I studied physics when I was at school. I had this great big heavy physics book I had to carry to school every day.” I stopped and corrected myself. “I had…
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My Unschooling Books

Parents and Kids

The Ladies Fixing the World

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…

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: Trust, Autonomy, and The Realities of Learning

The Ladies are Fixing the World again! Cecilie, Sandra and I are discussing the words ‘self-regulation’ and ‘limits’. When we say, “I’ve let go of control, and now I’m waiting for my child to learn how to regulate his time playing video games (for example),” do we have expectations about what that regulation should look like? Do we want…

Christian unschooling

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…

Should We Encourage Our Kids to Follow Their Dreams?

What did you want to be when you were a child? I wanted to be a writer. I had a cardboard box inside my wardrobe where I stored my scribbled stories about princesses, dragons and faraway kingdoms. At night, in bed, before dropping off to sleep, I’d think up stories about large happy families who were a lot like the…
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