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…

Mud Pies, Stews and Cakes

Gemma-Rose and Sophie are outside. They have been in the garden for hours despite the cool winter temperature. They have sand buckets and spades, and a big box of odds and ends: plates, bowls, spoons, pots, all leftovers from different…

A Birthday Chat

Every time I celebrate a birthday, going up a number, I ponder ageing anew. How do I feel about getting older? Am I reluctant to admit my age? Or am I grateful to be who I am at the age…

Giving My Unschoolers a Maths Test

I had this brilliant idea. Well, I thought it was a pretty good idea until this morning. It was all to do with maths. How do you prove your children are covering the required maths syllabus, and achieving the necessary…

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Why My Children and I Share Our Unschooling Evernote Notebooks

When I signed up for Evernote so did my children. Yes, we all have our own accounts. This allows us to share our notebooks. Why would we want to do that? That’s what I’m going to talk about today! Whenever I create a new weekly homeschool records notebook, I invite my daughters Sophie and Gemma-Rose to share it. I give them the ability to not only view the notes but to edit them as well. And my girls do the same, sharing…

Fan Mail and Lots of Unschooling Thoughts

This morning I felt very discouraged. Perhaps it was the result of being overtired. I don’t know. It’s strange how grey the world looks when we’re tired. Earlier today, nothing excited me. I didn’t want to blog or podcast. Sharing unschooling didn’t seem important. All I wanted to do was close my computer and forget everything. “Are you going to record a podcast today, Mum?” “I’ve got nothing to say,” I replied. “I’ve said it all before. I’m just repeating…

Our Typical Unschooling Mornings

This post follows on from Why Some Kids Are Willing to Help With the Chores. I’ve been thinking about how our life does look rather conventional. What makes our life… different from any structured homeschoolers’ life? Is it any different? How do we tell if someone is unschooling or not? We don’t stay up really late at night, we don’t drift through our days doing exactly what we want at all times, we get up very early in the morning,…

Why Some Kids Are Willing to Help with the Chores

I said that I have to be a good example if I want my children to help me get the house organised each morning… I have to jump out of bed and go out there and dive into the chores. I have to be willing to help so that my children are willing to help me. Sometimes when I go to the kitchen and see the dishes (waiting to be washed), I don’t want to do them. I think: Somebody…

Our Unschooling Morning Routine

Just before Christmas, Karen asked me if I could write about our typical unschooling days.  I spoke about this topic in a podcast a few months ago, so I thought I’d share some of what I said in a short series of posts. Today, I’m starting with our morning routine. Routine? That doesn’t sound very unschooly, does it? We all get up early in the morning. If it’s one of the warmer months of the year, we might go for…

Who’s on Your Team?

The other day I went for a walk with my daughter Imogen. As we were heading along a bush track, I noticed she was fumbling with her iPod. “Are you listening to something?” I asked. “No,” she replied. “I just had an idea about a blog post, and I’m making a note of it before I forget.” I understand about note making. I scribble down ideas all the time. If I didn’t, I’d soon forget them. And then some ‘brilliant’…

Evernote Homeschool Records: How Many Notebooks Do We Need?

How many Evernote notebooks do we need for recording our unschooling? Here are three options:  1. We could create only one notebook for the whole year eg: 2015 We can easily sort our notes if we tag them with the term and the week eg: term 1 week 1 If we want to see all the notes for week 1 of term 1, 2015, we search the 2015 notebook for the tags week 1 and term 1. 2. We could create…
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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…

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

Could Ebooks Save My Unschool Blog?

The other day, I logged into my blog hosting account to find out when my next payment is due and how much it will be. When I saw the bill due later this year, I gulped and said to my husband, “Do we want to spend so much money on a site that’s often slow or offline because of a…

Losing Time

I’ve been reading a book called A Time to Die by Nicholas Diat, who visited eight monasteries to talk to the monks about the experience of death. Here’s something that caught my attention: One monk described how he cares for the old and sick, and how he has to guard against doing things in a routine way, trying to complete…
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