Unschooling: A Slow but Productive Way of Life

My beautician and I have thought-provoking conversations. Yesterday, while Bonnie was taming and tinting my ageing eyebrows, making them look fierce, we chatted about time. We started with photography and how phones have simplified the process of capturing images. After…

My Maths-Magician Helps Out

We are going on holiday, our first holiday in years and the girls are very excited. I am very excited too! We have a cottage booked opposite the lake, not far from the beach.  A couple of weeks ago we…

Approaching Maths Backwards

The other day, I made a big mistake. I uttered the word ‘maths’ in Gemma-Rose’s presence. Oh my! She instantly became stiff and prickly.“What’s wrong with maths?” I asked.“It’s boring. It’s just a lot of numbers.” “You don’t like numbers?”…

It’s Not a Periscope 3: A Bush Walk

A sunny almost-winter afternoon. I’m taking Nora the dog for a walk. We’re heading down to the bush at the end of our road. Would you like to come too? I have to warn you: I’m a fast walker. And…

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Is the Internet Addictive or is There Another Reason Why I Waste Time Online?

I’ve announced I’m leaving Facebook. I could have slipped away quietly. It was tempting to do that. But I wanted to thank my friends for including me in their lives, taking an interest in mine, and being so kind and loving to me and my family over the past few years. Yes, Facebook hasn’t been all bad. Actually, it has enriched my life in many ways. So many kind comments: “I’ll miss you!” and “No!” and “I understand!” and “Can…

Disentangling Myself from the Internet

I’m lying in bed. Thoughts are running laps inside my head. Of course, I can’t sleep. I wonder if I should get up and write down what I’m thinking. Write the blog post that wants to be written. But I don’t push back the blankets and head for my computer: It’s cold. Instead, I continue to write inside my head until, several hours before dawn, the thoughts crash into each other and fall in a tangled heap. I finally fall…

How Do I Turn Unschooling Life into Homeschool Records?

Sometimes life is quiet. We can stay at home and relax.  There’s plenty of time to say such things as “Would you like to watch a Shakespeare play with me?” We read books and drink hot chocolate. We write and chat and work on our individual projects. And as we do all this, I add links and notes to our homeschool records book. But sometimes life races along at an incredible pace. We take trips away from home. I drive a…

What is Unschooling? A Transcript

Hayley from the blog Taking a kinder path transcribed my video What is Unschooling? allowing me to turn that video into a blog post. I’ve made minor changes to the original words so that my points are easier to understand – I never say things in a video or podcast as well as I’d like! – and to make the spoken words flow better as written ones. Being a perfectionist, I’m tempted to rewrite everything. (Perhaps, three years after making the video,…

No More Nice, Dead People!

This is a guest post by Carolyn Blessington. Late 2012, about when the world was supposed to end and more than two years before my first child was born, I took a class called REALationship 101 with a guy named Steve1.  My boyfriend and I needed help communicating and working out our differences.  So, we delved into Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication (NVC)2 and developed an awareness of our feelings, needs, and wants, and how to make requests (not demands) of…

Accepting, Respecting, and Loving Unconditionally: An Unschooler’s Thoughts

In episode 70 of my podcast, Trust, Respect, and Love Unconditionally. my daughter Sophie shared some very insightful thoughts about respecting kids, accepting them for who they are, and making them feel unconditionally loved. Here is a transcript of part of our conversation. Sophie was 15 at the time of this podcast interview. Sue: When you listen to other families talking to each other, what do you hear? Sophie: Parents always criticise: My child doesn’t do this. My child is…

Podcasting Breaks and Unschooling Books

This is a very short blog post. All I want to say is: I’m taking a short podcasting break while I work on my unschooling book. If you’d like to hear more about Podcasting Breaks and Unschooling Books, you could listen to this week’s very short podcast, episode 103. I hope you’ll watch out for a regular full-length podcast episode in a few weeks’ time! Podcast music: Twombly by Podington Bear, (CC BY-NC 3.0) Image: I didn’t record a podcast episode last week because…

Miles’ Model Munitions Germination

This is a guest post by unschooling teenager Miles Brack. About a month ago, my local home-schooling group held a “winter markets”. Mum suggested that I sell my wooden model guns… Setting up for the markets was a little hard. Seeing as I’d never met the audience I had no idea what to make for them. I had a hunch that the long guns had potential to be a best seller, but since they were the hardest and most expensive…
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My Unschooling Books

Parents and Kids

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!…

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

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…

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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