My Daughter, The Writer

“We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that child is someone today.” - Stacia Tauscher **originally posted in 2006 ** We were hanging out with our homeschooling friends one afternoon and my daughter Jacqueline was sitting on one of the picnic tables, finishing a story (Princess Barbie) she had started a few days before. I was having a conversation with another homeschooling mom and she asked...

Origami

** originally posted in 2007 ** We picked this origami book up at the library, dug out a pack of paper that we bought on clearance and Billy sat down with the girls to try it out. None of them had ever done it before so they chose an easy one to start with, which happened to be a frog. Billy’s in the black one, Jacqueline’s is green and Shawna’s is blue. They’re trying to see whose frog can hop the...

Learning All The Time

This highly opinionated former teacher and original thinker spent the last half of his life challenging widely accepted classroom practices. The author of 10 books that concentrate on early child development and education, Holt is widely considered the father of the modern-day homeschooling movement because he grew to believe that schools stifle the learning process. In this, his final book, compiled by colleagues from...

Valerie Fitzenreiter And Laurie Chancey Interview

Valerie Fitzenreiter is the author of The Unprocessed Child: Living Without School, a book about that she describes as “…how we raised our daughter, Laurie, with attachment parenting and unschooling methods. I discuss issues that concern parents who are considering unschooling their children and offer advice on living a peaceful coexistence with children”. She and her daughter Laurie (who was pursuing her...

Unschooling In The News

*Originally posted 2007* Kids Take School Into Their Own Hands: Some Home-School Families Are Opting for a New Approach to Curriculum; Unschooling BY Claire Scheumann From stock whips to ballet, Dungeons and Dragons to NASA, some Berkeley students say they are studying subjects they would not have access to in a traditional setting by pursuing a new kind of education called “unschooling.” Teaching children at home has a...

Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves

Every parent would happily give up ever scolding, punishing or threatening if she only knew how to ensure that her toddler/child/teen would thrive and act responsibly without such painful measures. Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves by Naomi Aldort is the answer to this universal wish. It is not about gentle ways to control a child, but about a way of being and of understanding a child so she/he can be the best of...

Real Learning

Originally posted in 2006 My daughter Jacqueline (age 7) is self taught on the subject of space/the universe. She’s interested in learning about the universe, because she’s interested in the universe, and that interest has taken her in many directions. I’ve been re-reading Guerrilla Learning by Grace Llewellyn and I wanted to share this: “Real learning requires meaning. Meaningless information can be...