Trust, Respect, and Love Unconditionally

Yesterday, I wrote a blog post called A Few Raw Thoughts on a Crumpled Piece of Paper. In this post, I explored some thoughts about unconditional love, respect, and trust. This morning, I told my daughter Sophie what I’d been…

Approaching Maths Backwards

The other day, I made a big mistake. I uttered the word ‘maths’ in Gemma-Rose’s presence. Oh my! She instantly became stiff and prickly.“What’s wrong with maths?” I asked.“It’s boring. It’s just a lot of numbers.” “You don’t like numbers?”…

REAL LIFE Junk Mail Catalogue MATHS

Yesterday I noticed a pile of junk mail catalogues sitting on the kitchen bench, waiting to be thrown into the recycling bin. I had an idea… “If I gave you $500 what would you buy, if you could choose anything…

Being Unschool Superheroes Who Save the World

A few days ago, it was my husband Andy’s birthday and our children gave him a lot of superhero-themed gifts: an Iron Man t-shirt, the original Hulk DVD and matching socks, a Captain America shirt and a Superman towel. Perfect…

Unschooling Siblings and Other Stories

I started writing this blog post last Friday. This is all I managed to write before I was interrupted: I didn’t make a podcast last week. Some unexpected things happened and so I didn’t find time to sit in front…

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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 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…

Forcing a Child to Do What He is Afraid to Do

My husband Andy has taken Charlotte and Gemma-Rose to the swimming pool, and I’m sitting here bleary-eyed after a late night. Yesterday evening, we went to the parish trivia event. Our team didn’t win, but we ended up with a respectable score, and didn’t disgrace the name of teacher and homeschooling parent. We were good at answering questions on cars, vegetables, religion and sport, but we were hopeless at identifying celebrities. But we can live with that. Andy came home,…

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…

A Better Way to Get into University

The HSC (or Higher School Certificate) is the exam all school students in our state take at the end of their final year of school. Homeschoolers are not eligible to sit the HSC. So how will our children get into university? How will they get a job? Are they at a disadvantage compared with school children? Or do they actually have an advantage?   This morning, just after 10 o’clock, the girls were sitting around the kitchen table sipping drinks,…
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My Unschooling Books

Parents and Kids

The Ladies Fixing the World

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.…

Learning to Read and Trusting Unschooling

It is absolutely essential that we are curious people who are excited about the possibilities in life. The atmosphere in our homes gets picked up by our kids so they think it’s normal to learn, to be curious, to follow thoughts and ideas and try things out… I was battling with my kids for a while. They kept saying, ‘Why…

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…

Christian unschooling

Igniting a Child’s Love of Learning

Do you wake up each morning with a delicious feeling of anticipation? Do you swing your legs out of bed quickly, anxious to get dressed and move onto the business of the day? Another day of learning with your children stretches ahead… Do you feel excited? Once upon a time, I used to drag myself out of bed and…

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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