How I Gave Up and Started Unschooling

A guest post by Venisa McAllister We started with high hopes. When my oldest daughter Sarah was old enough for kindergarten I enrolled her in a program called k-12. They would give us a computer, fun learning materials, and help…

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…

Sophie’s Basket

  Or Imogen and Charlotte’s book recommendations for their younger sisters  We are sitting around the table munching our lunch and chatting.  Sophie tells us she wants to learn more about horses and Charlotte mentions brumbies.  “Brumbies?”  “The wild horses…

Bad Haircuts and Unschooling Adventures

In this week’s solo podcast episode, I’m sharing a few stories, and talking about how we can be more adventurous. It’s good to be adventurous, isn’t it? Adventures are fun. They connect us together as a family. They open us…

Real Life Family Unschool Maths

A few years ago, when my daughter Sophie was 10, she started to say, “I’m no good at maths. I hate it!” At the time, Sophie was using a formal structured maths course. When she started sighing over her work,…

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Realising What’s Important

Many years ago, I discovered that a friend of mine never irons her clothes. She doesn’t even own an iron. I thought this was rather strange. Surely clothes need ironing? At the time, I ironed nearly everything. (I didn’t iron underwear!) And then one day, I stopped ironing my clothes. Maybe I got lazy. Or perhaps I was busy. Whatever the reason, I embraced the wrinkles instead of smoothing them away. And you know what? It was okay. No one…

Another Novel: The Unschooling Adventure Continues!

hat do you think? A safe and secure job? Or should we encourage our kids to follow their dreams? Should they give the more adventurous path a go? Could they work part-time while continuing to follow their passions? Recently, I’ve had a lot of visitors to my blog from Facebook. Someone shared my post Choosing Not to Look for a ‘Real’ Job. When I wrote this post, my daughter Imogen had just finished her Bachelor of Arts degree. Instead of…

Stories About Connection from Radical Unschool Love

In this week’s podcast, I’m sharing a few stories that can be found in my book, Radical Unschool Love: A Teenager’s Thoughts Learning Right from Wrong Developing a Sense of Right and Wrong Can We Be Both Parent and Friend? One-on-One Times In episode 165, I’m also sharing a blog post called Radical Unschooling: Something Beautiful. Show Notes My Unschooling Books Curious Unschoolers: Kindle Curious Unschoolers: paperback Radical Unschool Love: Kindle Radical Unschool Love: paperback My Amazon Author Page Blog…

Discouraged

I’m feeling discouraged. I wonder: why am I doing this? Why am I blogging and podcasting? I know the answer: I want to spread the word about unschooling. I want to pass on what I’ve learnt. Tell others about the joys of living this way of life. I especially want to give hope to families who are struggling with homeschooling and parenting. There’s a better way. But am I sharing the unschooling message successfully? Sometimes it’s hard to know. The…

Time and Trust and Letting Go

If Darth Vader somehow got into your podcast, would you still publish it? If you tuned into a podcast episode and heard some noisy breathing, would you continue listening? Why am I asking these strange questions? Well, the latest episode of my podcast isn’t perfect. And that’s because I’m experimenting with yet another recording setup. Oh my, I’ve had a lot of technical problems recently. Podcasting has become very difficult. For episode 163, I used Adobe Audition to capture and…

Asking for Help

A few weeks ago, I was feeling rather stressed out so I took a break from podcasting. It’s been good not having to produce a new episode each week. Podcasting is hard work! I must now be feeling more rested because a day or so ago, I suddenly felt like making a new podcast. I headed into my closet, set up my mic and started recording episode 162 of my Stories of an Unschooling Family podcast. So what did I talk…

How to Turn an Art Gallery Outing into Homeschool Records Notes

Awhile back, Gemma-Rose and I went to the art gallery in Sydney to see the Masters of Modern Art exhibition. When we returned home, I turned our outing into homeschool records. What kind of notes did I make? Well, here are some of the things I added to our Evernote notebook: Photos of Gemma-Rose in the art gallery and a description of where we went and what we saw. A screenshot of a google map showing the gallery location.  Scans…
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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.…

Christian unschooling

Christian Unschooling: Disciplining With Unconditional Love

If our children misbehave, what do we do? Make them sit on the time-out chair? Punish them? Perhaps we should withdraw our love. Be cold and distant. Make things unpleasant for our kids because they need to know how upset we are, don’t they? We want them to feel bad because then, maybe, they’ll remember to act in the right…

The Problem With Being Too Nice

Are you too nice? I am. I want to help everyone. Support and encouragement are my middle names. Send me an email and I’ll spend hours answering it. Write me a comment and I’ll always reply. Ask for some mentoring and I’ll do my best even though you tell me you can’t pay. I write a book. And another. Then…
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