Thinking about Maths Creatively

It seems to me there are three main ways of learning maths: the workbook way, the real life maths way and the messing-about-with-numbers way. Sophie once learnt maths the workbook way. She wasn’t actually using paper books. She was using…

Unschooling and Trust

I have been struggling with this post for a while now, and wondering why I’m having so much trouble finding the right words. And I have decided it’s the language. I want to write a story from a personal point…

Turning Waiting Times into Unschooling Adventures

Do you spend a lot of time waiting? I used to. When my kids were younger, I had to wait while they had piano lessons, singing lessons, musicianship lessons and swimming lessons. I waited while they went to Brownies and…

Books, Music, Burnout and a Mystery!

This podcast is a few days late or a couple of days early, depending on how you look at it. It’s also not the same podcast I originally recorded. This week I reveal what happened to the first one and…

Latest

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

Listening to Kids

The other day I interviewed my 14-year-old daughter, Sophie: I wanted to hear her opinions about perfect families, mistakes and listening to kids. It…

The Ladies Fixing the World

The Math Myth: How Do Unschooled Kids Learn Math?

There are many unschool maths questions. Here are just a few of them: Can kids really learn maths without formal instruction? What does unschooling maths look like? Can we strew unschool maths? Is it possible for registered homeschoolers to unschool maths? How can we provide evidence kids are learning maths when we don’t have formal records like workbooks and test…

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!…

Christian unschooling

Pondering Trust

I never wanted to be in a position where I had to trust God. I preferred to rely on my own resources. I wanted to be totally in control of my own life. That seemed easier to do because trusting is so very difficult. Or so it can seem. Then one day, at a time when I was feeling rather…

Radical Unschool Love, Praise and Joy

Do you ever praise your kids? Do you tell them you’re proud of them? Some people say we shouldn’t praise our kids. Maybe that’s because our children might end up doing things only because they want to gain our approval. And is there a risk a child might think she is better than everyone else if we praise her too…
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