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Unschooling Voices #12 will be hosted over at Relaxed Homeskool and Kim chose this edition’s (always optional) question(s) of the month:

1)Write the unschooling manual for a newbie in 400 words or less- have fun!

2)Take the Unschooling Images Challenge and describe your unschooling experience using pictures. Here’s the questions but you can add more or change them at will:
*Your favorite resource
*One field trip they loved and learned on
*The game they love so much they don’t realize it is educational
*What you’ve “strewn” lately
*Everyday task where they pick up lots of info
* A resource you have always wanted to purchase for the children but keep putting off
*What your kids think school is really like
* Best place to unschool

If you’d like to host a future edition, just let me know.

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Colleen, who blogs at The New Unschooler whose submissions “shows that I’m learning a thing or two about respecting my child’s feelings and taking him seriously. It’s about two very similar situations with vastly different outcomes. What made the difference? The first time I fell back on my standard parental response and the second time I applied the principles of unschooling. You can probably guess which scenario produced the happy ending”.

Becky submitted a post from her blog Life Without School and says “My six year old son is learning to read, and I didn’t teach him how!”

Stephanie from Learning Through Living answers the (always optional) question of the month with her post.

Mandy at Second To The Right, And Straight On Till Morning also submitted a post answering this months question.

Mary Nix, Editor and Writer for Home Education Magazine (and someone who has given a lot to the homeschooling community) says she wrote her post after being inspired by this months question.

Sally shares a post “about my intention to revisit my January posts from previous years blogging. I find that I’m often revisiting the same issues. However, it is fascinating to find how much you also move on over time, sometimes, pleasingly, toward the goals you hold”.

From the Life Without School community blog, comes a post by Tammy who says “Letting my kids have their own intellectual jam sessions, that’s what we are doing when we let them follow their interests. And when I can (which is pretty often), I jam right along with them. And together, we make music.”

Also from the Life Without School Community Blog, Robin submitted a post on a topic that came up recently on one of the unschooling lists…Unschooling As A Single Parent by Becky.

Silvia over at Po Moyemu updates us on her radical unschooling journey.

Robin from The Miracle That Is My Life says this about her submission, “We are doing our best to live a radical unschooling life and learn respectful parenting. This particular entry is about my son’s transition into toddlerhood and the beginning of the demands for autonomy. Our RU life looks a lot different now that Sam is no longer just a cheerful little soul concentrating all his efforts on putting one foot in front of the other. His undersanding of the world and his place in it grows every moment of every day and he wants to experience everything and has developed a fine and hearty voice of protest. Learning to respect this is both challenging and extraordinarily wonderful to me.”

Rounding up the posts is my submission, which is an older one, being I haven’t been blogging much these last couple of months. Here are some pictures from a recent day out with our homeschool group to a nature trail.

There you have it! Thank you to everyone who participated this month. Unschooling Voices is going to be doing a bit of travelling the next few months, starting at Kim’s blog, Relaxed Homeskool for Unschooling Voices #12. If anyone is interested in hosting a future edition, let me know. I’ve posted Kim’s question for the next edition-don’t forget to send them in before Feb 1st.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoy this edition!

This edition had 24 participants and 32 submissions. Click on the blog links, stop by and say hello to your fellow unschooling families. Let them know you found them through Unschooling Voices.

Optional question for this month:
1- What advice would you have given to yourself early in your unschooling journey?
2- Ask your kids to take pictures of their favorite ________ (favorite whatever; person, place, thing, etc). Share your photos on the Unschooling Voices Flickr Group and you can use the Unschooling Voices Flickr Tag.

Our first post is from Pam Genant who blogs at Meanderings Of A Gentle Gull. She shares her thoughts about the word enable, enabling as it relates to her family.

Cher from Cake For Breakfast shares an except from Rue Kream’s book, Parenting A Free Child that inspired her.

Melissa Wiley, (who is one of the sweetest bloggers I’ve ever come across) explains her post Lovely, Lovely Low Tide, “I use “high tide” and “low tide” as metaphors for our family’s shift between more deliberate learning experiences and long, undirected periods of natural learning. This post discusses how the work of radical unschoolers, particularly Sandra Dodd’s website and book, influence our unschoolish low-tide times.”

Robin from the Life Without School Community Blog, submitted a post by Missy Chasing Bananas and one by Laureen, Unschooling And The Digital Native.

Karen at Eclectic Parent shares thoughts on socialization and why “we’re to busy experiencing life to worry about our children being socialized.”

Doc over at Doc’s Sunrise Rants submitted another great post on socialization titled “What I Learned From Unschooling.” (I also enjoyed the readers comments)

Maria from Living On Adrenaline shares “our family’s story of how we live, educate and love in our home and how being open to life brought me to unschooling.”

Silvia, who blogs at Po Moyemu, submitted, “Live and Learn Unschooling Conference Recap and Radical Unschooling” and has turned it into a short series of posts, the first one mainly about Radical Unschooling and the others about the conference. She’s linking them with a liveandlearn tag so people can find the others. She also submitted one of those great Day in the Life of an Unschooler type of posts. (I love reading those!)

Becky from Life Without School says “How is unschooling like running a marathon? As I reflect on the intensity of running 26.2 miles, I am reminded that a good dose of compassion and respect can get me through my toughest parenting moments.”

Laura at Puddles & Butterflies answers the question of the month in a post titled “Are Your Unschooling Glasses Smudgey”?

Another great post from Pam Genant at Meanderings of a Gentle Gull is her response to a mom, new to unschooling and a brief description of how her two sons started reading in their own time, two unique boys, different reading experiences.

Answering the question of the month are Cher, who blogs at Cake For Breakfast and Lesa at Living in Freedom Everyday who both tell us what advice they would have given themselves in the early days of their unschooling. Also from Lesa, a post titled Unschooling Works!

Henry & Janine at Why Homeschool, shared an article on the value of playing outdoors.

Colleen from The New Unschooler tell us “as a new unschooler I’m still trying to wade through those murky waters of preconceived notions of what learning looks like and find my place as a facilitator, rather than a teacher, in my son’s life. It’s a daily struggle, but in this post I write about a happy break through”. (good going Colleen!)

Another post from the Life Without School Community Blog, they give background, explainations and resources in a page called What is Unschooling?

Laura over at Wistful Wanderlust shares her thoughts in “Unschooling-How Did We Get Here?”, which is part one of a series that of posts where she shares her journey from mainstream parenting to radical unschooling.

More posts answering the question of the month were submitted by Mandy from Second To The Right And Straight On Till Morning who blogged about “how my advice to myself early in unschooling would be to just say “YES!” more frequently and I show how, by saying yes, you encourage your children to be creative and make their own choices about things”. Also, check out the great photos her daughter Violet took and submitted. Some more advice from Summer can be found at Mom Is Teaching.

Jason Holm submitted the link to his comic strip called Schools Are For Fish, which is about homeschooling/unschooling. I posted one of them here a few months back but if you haven’t seen all of them, check it out!

Some additional submissions from Silvia at Po Moyemu are “things I had read before homeschooling and they helped a lot, and maybe will be beneficial for other homeschoolers”. Take a look at My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and an essay by John Taylor Gatto.

Here’s a post from Karen Edmisten titled, Label Me Schizophrenic.

JoVE who blogs at Trictomania wrote a post in a discussion amongst a few bloggers about what constitutes a “good learning day”. On rereading her post, she thinks that the conclusions she comes to and the issues she addresses are the kinds of things that a new homeschooler might find helpful.

Rolfe Schmidt submitted a post that “is a little story about how my oldest boy came up with his own arithmetic system, adding colors instead of numbers. I learned a lot about how much kids can learn on their own, how important it is to take them seriously, and the value of learning with your kids. I also started to realize that we were unschooling, and it was working”.

Another post from Summer, this time at Wired For Noise which is about “reading a book on simple living and thinking about how the normal educational system causes us to be dependent on all the gadgets and things we think we need”.

Cindy Englan from The Sound Of Learning blogged about “my youngest turns 21 this year and is now on the road to earning his Ph.D. Listening to him talk about college reminded me that this was the child that refused to read until age 10. The one who detested any and all textbooks, worksheets and tests. He taught me that learning math from Legos and baking cookies was entirely possible, that invented spelling until age 14 meant nothing more than a creative mind was on the job”.
From Jenn at Living Alaska, we have a blog post titled, “Please-Thank You”.

Last, is my submission of photos my daughters took of their favorite things. It’s the very next post, so scroll down to take a peek at what they love.

I’ve had so many feelings with this edition…so much has changed for me since the last one. Besides my mom passing away (how I hate typing that-it always stops me for a moment), we’ve been on an emotional (and legal) roller coaster ride with our oldest son. It was really rough for a while but it looks like at least the legal part of it is over. I’ll post more about him at another time. Thank you all for your support during this rough time. It means a lot to me and my family.

The next edition will be out on Saturday, December 1. Spread The Word!! I do my best to promote the carnival and you can help by using the technorati tag unschooling voices or unschoolingvoices and by placing a link on your blog or website. If you want to place a link to the main page (where all the details and past editions can be found), use the main Unschooling Voices link or you can just link to this edition. This blog is a Do Follow Blog.

Thank you for reading and participating.

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