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How to Turn Cooking into Unschool Maths Homeschool Records Notes

When you hear the words ‘real life maths’ or ‘real world maths’ what do you think of? Cooking? That’s the usual example, isn’t it? “My kids did lots of real life maths today. They cooked a cake for morning tea.” When my children were younger, they often made cakes and biscuits and even whole meals. And each time, I’d jot down some notes in our homeschool records notebook and label them as ‘maths.’ When I first started doing this, it…

An Adult Learning Unschooling Challenge

I have an adult learning unschooling challenge for you! It’s part of a series of challenges that I’ve written that, hopefully, will help turn unschooling principles and ideas into something real in your lives.  Years ago, I used to think education was for kids. I’d been to school and completed my education. Now it was my children’s turn to work (and their turn to suffer.) It was me against them. Some days getting them to learn was a real battle.…

Judging and Other People’s Opinions

Why do we judge each other? Why do we worry so much about other people’s opinions of us? And what would everyone think of me if they knew what I did? In this vlog, I tell a story about a duck murderer, and another one about death and a bar of chocolate, as I ponder the above questions. Something Extra I also wrote the death and chocolate story as a blog post: Unschooling: Judging One Another Photos I took…

Delights: An Unschooling Challenge

I‘ve experienced many dark days over the last couple of years. There have been lots of times when I’ve wanted to run away, but that hasn’t always been possible. Where can one go when no one is allowed to leave home? I’ve had to find another way to survive the strange times we’re living in. I decided to search for the beauty that I was sure was still in our world. Each day, I looked for delights. Many times, I…

Have I Changed My Unschooling Mind About Screens?

If I had younger children, would I give them iPads of their own? Would I encourage them to spend as much time as they liked using technology? Is this the right unschooling thing to do? I’ve pondered these questions a lot. Not so long ago, I’d have said, “Kids learn a lot from the Internet and their devices. Books are good, but technology is even better! Yes, there’s nothing wrong with giving young kids unlimited access to the Internet and…

How to Be Brave

The other day, I was thinking about bravery. What is being brave all about? Are we brave when we do something that might make people stare, such as having our hair cut startling short? Or is there more to bravery than that? After pondering a few thoughts for a while, I headed to my front doorstep with my phone camera and made a vlog on this topic. Along the way, I told some stories about open casket funerals, disastrous haircuts,…

Meander the Unschooling Way

There are two routes to our local town. The first one is the efficient way. Once we’ve left the road that leads out of our village, we drive along the highway, through multiple sets of traffic lights before we arrive in town. The other route is the meandering one, the one that winds its way through bush and paddocks, round bends, and up hills and down. If I’m not in a hurry, I like to avoid the traffic and go…
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My Unschooling Books

Parents and Kids

The Ladies Fixing the World

Unschooling Isn’t Freedom Gone Wild: Why Choices Matter More Than Ideals

My husband Andy returned to work today after two weeks at home. Holiday time is over. We’ve now moved into term time. A whole term of possibility days stretches before me. I’m free to do whatever I like with my time while Andy is at school. My eyes light up with delight. But then I remember there are many…

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…

Christian unschooling

When We Don’t Know What to Do

I’ve just updated my blog. I started at the first post I ever wrote and then worked my way through 14 years of stories, reading each one before deciding whether to keep it or revert it to draft. I then checked the formatting of the retained posts, rearranging paragraphs, eliminating dead links, and changing or improving the images. As I…

How to Write a Million Unschool Love Stories

I used to think the defining word of unschooling was freedom. Freedom attracted me. I wanted to be free to do whatever I liked. I wanted to get up each day and do anything or nothing at all. But I soon realised there’s a problem with freedom. If we always do whatever we like, won’t we become self-centred? Thinking only…
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