Encouraging Each Other

Sue Elvis is a mother of 8 with stacks of stories to tell. She generously shares her Stories of an Unschooling Family on her blog, YouTube channel, podcast, Instagram and most recently in her books, Curious Unschoolers and Radical Unschool…

Building Strong Relationships With Our Kids

Last week, we went on an adventure. Sophie, Gemma-Rose, Andy and I travelled to a small country town in the north of our state to visit our son Callum. We spent a few days bumping along dirt roads in Callum’s…

Younger Unschoolers: Our Learning Adventure Rules

If we’re willing to seize the moment, we can have some fabulous spur-of-the-moment learning adventures. We could find ourselves unexpectedly sitting on a beach watching breaching whales. But can we also have planned adventures with our unschooling kids? Oh yes!…

One Day Life Changed

A few days ago, my sister suggested we swap a daily photo via email, so I’ve been looking around to see what I can capture with my camera. I used to take lots of photos of my kids. They’d be…

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.…

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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

Teenagers are People Too

At Mass on Sunday, during the Prayers of the Faithful, we were asked to pray for sullen teenagers. When we returned home, Imogen was…

Unschooling: Dishes

This evening, after dinner, I didn’t want to help with the dishes. I just wanted to relax on the sofa and leave everyone else…

The Ladies Fixing the World

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…

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…

Resources for Unschoolers

Strolling towards the shopping centre, I spy an older man with three hand-reared brightly coloured parrots. A few wide-eyed kids are gathered around him, and as I watch, he transfers a parrot to one of their shoulders, where it bounces lightly upon its feet, nuzzling a little ear. The child grins, hardly daring to move. The children have questions which…

Christian unschooling

Shall We Talk About Christian Unschooling?

I often get to the point where I feel I haven’t got anything more to say about unschooling. I wonder: is it time to move on? At the beginning of last year, I reached such a point. However, instead of thinking about moving away from unschooling, I proposed the idea of exploring unschooling from a different angle. Should we discuss…

When Mothering Is Not Enough

Should our kids be our whole world? Should we dedicate all our time and effort to raising the most precious people in our lives? Or is it okay to combine motherhood with our own interests? Could there be advantages in using our gifts and pursuing the things that bring us joy not only for us but also for our kids?…
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