Glimpsing the World through a Child’s Eyes

“Do you want to watch a movie? We’re having a boys’ movie night.” A movie night? That sounds like a relaxing way to spend an evening. Someone grabs the popcorn, someone else inserts the DVD into the player and then…

The Dangers of Distraction

We often let ourselves be distracted, don’t we? But while we’re enjoying the excitement of pursuing something new and sparkly, there’s a danger we’ll lose the important things we already have. I dart from one project to another as they…

Are You a Daring and Adventurous Parent?

Last week, my husband Andy and I took our four youngest girls away on holiday. We spent a few days at a salt water lake, swimming, kayaking and making sandcastles. Two of my girls are young adults, but they were…

When Children Move Out of an Unschool Home

Some parenting ‘experts’ advise us to push our kids out of the family home as soon as possible. They tell us to make our kids stand on their own two feet. But my husband and I have ignored this advice.…

Let’s Talk Maths

My girls have been learning maths in a formal way rather than as a consequence of life. But I have been thinking…  The girls used to use workbooks, the sort that cover one school year at a time. They filled…

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How Younger Siblings Learn by Listening In

On Sunday Father S began his homily: “In Hamlet, it says, ‘To thine own self be true’.” Gemma-Rose dug me in the side and whispered loudly, her eyes wide with excitement, “Hamlet!” We are halfway through reading this Shakespeare play and Gemma-Rose couldn’t believe Father knew about Hamlet too. Later around the table, while we ate our Sunday cereal and crumpets, we had a good discussion: “Which character said, ‘To thine own self be true’?” “Polonius!” “I wouldn’t agree with…

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,…
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My Unschooling Books

Parents and Kids

Boy Stories

Usually I speak and write about my four youngest daughters. But not today.  For this week’s podcast, I share some boy stories. I received…

The Ladies Fixing the World

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!…

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…

Christian unschooling

Respecting Kids and Christmas Presents

Does having a simple Christmas sound good? It does to me. This year, like last year and the one before, I wanted to announce that I’m not buying a lot of Christmas presents. I thought about saying that I’m not buying any at all. I didn’t want to think and think until the perfect gift ideas came to mind. I…

Christian Unschooling: Do Kids Need Silence and Space to Hear God?

We should share our faith with our kids, but do we also need to give them space to ponder, wonder, and hear God in the silence? Or is that risky? Is faith something we need to impress on our kids, insisting they adopt it without question? Because we don’t want to lose our children, do we? Faith is important.…
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