An Unschooling Experiment

Do you listen to my podcasts? Normally, I don’t. I make an episode and that’s that. I hope everyone enjoys it, but I don’t really want to go back and listen to my own voice talking about unschooling. But this…

A Typical Unschooling Day at Home

Yesterday… The phone alarm beeps at 6.10 am. A few minutes later, I swing my legs over the side of the bed, and pad down the hall to the girls’ bedrooms. I open their doors and say, “Anyone want to…

Stolen Paintings and Real Life Maths

Last week was a hunting week… My daughters and I watched as the FBI tried to hunt down a number of stolen masterpieces. And then I went on a hunt for some real life maths experiences. (Where’s all that maths…

Latest

How Children Learn According to Sophie

I’ve been pondering how children learn. So has Sophie… Sophie: If you want to learn something you have to be interested in it… like the elephants I was reading about today. That was really interesting and I remember so much. Sue: What happens if you’re not interested? Sophie: Then it all goes straight out the door. You don’t absorb it. Sue: Can you learn something like times tables even if it’s not interesting? Sophie: Yes, because you can use those.…

A Little Unobtrusive Help with Reading

Many years ago, I taught my first child Felicity to read so quickly and easily, I was sure I was a brilliant homeschooling mother. What was everyone else doing wrong? Teaching a child to read? Easy!  Or so I thought.  Then Duncan came along and the word ‘frustrated’ became part of my everyday vocabulary. He could remember the sounds of letters, but running them together to form words was a slow and laborious process. I suddenly realised I hadn’t taught…

Handwriting Matters or Maybe it Doesn’t

Some of my children have beautiful handwriting and some don’t.  “What are you going to do when you go to university? Your tutor won’t spend time trying to decipher your essays. If he can’t read them, you’ll fail.”  My eldest children went to university. “Handwritten assignments aren’t accepted, Mum. See, I didn’t need good handwriting after all!”  So I was wrong. Times have changed. Good typing skills are now more valuable than beautiful handwriting. Even I don’t handwrite much these…

Learning about Punctuation the Lewis Carroll Way

I never used to bother with the finer points of punctuation because I wasn’t sure how to use such devices as colons and semi-colons. For a long time, I didn’t even know their proper names. To me, they were two dots, or a dot and a comma. And I’m supposed to be an educated woman. But one day, help arrived in an unexpected way.  I started reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland out loud to my children, and I became very excited.…

Listening

Gemma-Rose’s turn to read. My turn to listen. When I was an eleven-year-old student, our teacher got out her tape recorder and played us a current affairs radio program. It was a hot summer’s afternoon, late in the day, and I felt sleepy. I didn’t even try to concentrate on the program.  I spent the half hour I should have been listening, daydreaming instead. Apparently, almost all my fellow students did the same thing. And the teacher must have suspected that our minds were not on world news…

Why I’m Not a Good Homeschooling Teacher

Everyone thinks I homeschool my fourteen-year-old daughter, Charlotte. I don’t. She homeschools herself. I try to help her: “Charlotte, I have a new book we’re just about to start reading. What you like to join us?” “No thanks, Mum. I have something else planned.” “Charlotte we’re going to watch this DVD. Do you want to watch too?” “Not right now, thank you Mum. I’m in the middle of something else.” So Sophie, Gemma-Rose and I settle on the sofa together…

Education Doesn’t Have a Use-by-Date

Yesterday Imogen was peering over Charlotte’s shoulder, looking at all the interesting things she is learning.  “You are giving yourself a much better education than the one I gave myself,” Imogen complained. “Look at all those wonderful books you’re reading. I haven’t read any of them.”  “Well, it’s not too late,” replied Charlotte. “Your education isn’t over even though you’re doing uni work rather than homeschooling. You could read these books too.”  Then she added, “Education doesn’t have a use-by-date,…

Doodling

My girls love to doodle. I do too! I used to think doodles were those scribbles people draw while they are talking on the phone. They are, but they’re also a whole lot more. Doodles are easy to draw, require little artistic skill but are so satisfying to work on. Anyone can doodle. Anyone can produce drawings that satisfy. I also like how they encourage creativity. Doodling is a bit like writing. You set off not knowing where you will…
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My Unschooling Books

Parents and Kids

Can Christians Unschool?

Can Christians unschool? We’re Christian unschoolers. Maybe you’re Christian unschoolers too? There are lots of us living this way of life. But are we…

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: 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

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…

Kids, Needs, and Church

Should unschooled kids be forced to go to church? I wonder if this is the wrong question to ask when our kids protest about coming with us. Would it be better to ask, Why doesn’t my child want to go to church? In this week’s podcast, I talk about this question as well as : The importance of trying to see…
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