Published by
Joanne on
February 24, 2010
I really enjoy the Spiritual Parenting newsletter by Mimi Doe and have been receiving it for quite some time. The title of the current one is ‘The Love That Listens”. Some of the highlights for me are:
ASK… LISTEN… AND LISTEN DEEPER
ASK….
Ask your child to make a list of all the things she wants to know more about. You may be very surprised. Follow through on this information and provider her with materials, books, teachers if appropriate, and opportunities to explore her interests. Encouraging your child’s natural inquisitiveness about all things nourishes her soul.
LISTEN…
Often a child will talk to a neighbor or friend instead of directly to you. Are there enough of these removed listeners in your child’s life? Can you be a receiving adult for a child other than your own?
LISTEN DEEPER…
Perhaps you are open and available to listen to your child but feel there is more that you need to know. Try talking directly to your child’s soul, guardian angel, or spirit. Get quiet and mentally ask if there is something you need to be aware of. You can ask for a picture or message that will help you parent in a deeper way. Listen to the thoughts that come.
PARENTS’ INSIGHT-BUILDING EXERCISE
Think of a time when you were heard as a child.
- Who listened?
- How did it feel to be heard?
- What did you say that was acknowledged?
- How does that experience live with you today?
Now think back to a time when you were there to listen to your child.
- What was that like?
- Why were you available to listen? Had you made time? Was your child demanding you stop and listen?
- What did you hear?
- How did your child react when you listened?
Ask for guidance this week on how to best hear your children’s needs. Ask for divine insight into ways you can help give your child’s feelings a voice.
Now let go and remain open to receiving insight and guidance. Listen to the subtle ways your inner wisdom is revealed.
Trust your ideas and insights; YOU are wise.
*Mimi Doe is the founder of Spiritual Parenting.com and the award-winning author of “Nurturing Your Teenager’s Soul”, “Busy But Balanced”, “10 Principles for Spiritual Parenting”, and co-author of “Don’t’ Worry Get In”. Mimi’s free newsletter, Spiritual Parenting, has more than 30m000 subscribers from around the world. Sign up on the website: www.SpiritualParenting.com.
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Published by
Joanne on
February 19, 2010
March 2, 2006:
Homeschooling grows quickly in United States
COLUMBIA, Maryland (Reuters)
Elizabeth and Teddy Dean are learning about the Italian scientist Galileo, so they troop into the kitchen, where their mother Lisa starts by reviewing some facts about the Renaissance. Elizabeth, 11, and Teddy, 8, have never gone to school.
Their teachers are primarily their parents, which puts them into what is believed to be the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. education system — the homeschool movement.
For their science lesson, Teddy and Elizabeth are joined by three other homeschooled children and their mother, who live down the street in their suburb midway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
Before the lesson starts, all five kids change into Renaissance costumes — long dresses and bonnets for the girls, tunics and swords for the boys. “We definitely have a lot more fun than kids who go to school,” Elizabeth said.
Nobody is quite sure exactly how many American children are being taught at home. The National Center for Education Statistics, in a 2003 survey, put the number that year at 1.1 million. The Home School Legal Defense Association, which represents some 80,000 member families, says the figure now is quite a bit higher — between 1.7 and 2.1 million.
But there is no disagreement about the explosive growth of the movement — 29 percent from 1999 to 2003 according to the NCES study, or 7 to 15 percent a year according to HSLDA.
This growth has spawned an estimated $750 million a year market supplying parents with teaching aids and lesson plans to fit every religious and political philosophy. Homeschooled children regularly show up in the finals of national spelling competitions, generating publicity for the movement.
Parents cite many reasons for deciding to opt out of formal education and teach their children at home. In the NCES study, 31 percent said they were concerned about drugs, safety or negative peer pressure in schools; 30 percent wanted to provide religious or moral instruction while 16 percent said they were dissatisfied with academic standards in their local schools.
“I wasn’t sold on the idea of institutionalized education. It’s a factory approach — one size fits all,” said Isabel Lyman, author of “The Homeschooling Revolution,” who taught both of her now-grown sons at home.
“The schools take all the joy out of learning. They don’t take account of a particular child’s interests, needs and development. The whole system is anti-child,” she said.
Regulation, instruction varyDifferent states take widely varying approaches to homeschooling. Some, like New York and Pennsylvania, require that the parents submit lesson plans four times a year and regularly test the children.
Others, like Texas, basically leave them alone. So there is little reliable data on how they are doing, said University of Colorado education professor Kevin Welner.
“There are popular myths that homeschooled children are socially inept, cloistered kids and that they are either illiterate or academic wunderkinds. Anecdotes aside, we simply don’t have the data to make such generalizations,” he said.
“Some children will get top-notch instruction. Others will get poor or minimal instruction. Obviously it will vary by parent,” he said.
Even the cliche that the majority of homeschooled children are evangelical Christians is outdated, if it was ever true.
The movement remains overwhelmingly white and middle class but it is growing fast among black and Hispanic families and becoming more politically and religiously diverse as well.
Some parents follow an educational philosophy known as “unschooling,” where the children are encouraged to follow their own interests rather than adhering to a fixed curriculum.
Laura Derrick, president of the National Home Education Network, has followed this philosophy with her 14-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter. “My son learned to read before he was 3 and I realized then we were working better than any school program ever designed,” she said. “Children are born wanting to learn.”
Lisa Dean, who was a lawyer before she became a mother, said homeschooling her children was tremendously rewarding but also very exhausting. “It’s a long day with the kids. I look forward to when my husband comes home,” she said.
She also has backup from a local group of 70 homeschooling families who organize group field trips and extracurricular activities. Her children both take lessons in Celtic music on the fiddle, play soccer and basketball and have tried classes in art, hip-hop dancing and kick boxing.
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Published by
Joanne on
February 1, 2010
For some people that are unfamiliar with unschooling, or homeschooling for that matter, it’s hard to imagine a life without school. School eats up so much of their time that they find it difficult to understand what their kids would do without it. That’s why those “Day In The Life Of An Unschooler/Homeschooler” posts are so important and we’ve done many here at An Unschooling Life over the years.
We’ve had so much going on recently that I thought it would be nice to show a week in my unschoolers lives, instead of just one day. Enjoy! 
Making pillows they received for Christmas:
Playing basketball:
Going to Girl Scouts:
LOL….getting tickled:
Going to the Museum of Natural History, for the Amazon Voyage exhibit, with friends:
Helping dad make yummy sauce:
Making Gummi Bears (more in another post):
In between these pictures was a lot of playing Guitar Hero on PS2, reading the Twilight series, writing stories about fairies, playing Golden Compass on wii, phone calls from friends, internet surfing, day dreaming, playing Scattegories, going to the park with friends and much, much more.
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Published by
Joanne on
January 15, 2010
In order for homeschooling/unschooling to work for us, I had to go through my own deschooling process, which was more deep rooted and tangled up than my kids deschooling was for them. Because I went to school longer than they had, and knowing the public school system from both as a student and as a parent, it was harder for me to look at education and school a different way than I had before.
For those who’ve never heard of deschooling, it’s the process one goes through after leaving an institutionalized schooling environment. Your child has probably their natural desire to learn squashed and will need time to recover from that. With a parent’s help, they can gain back most, if not all of what they lost and begin to see the world as a place where learning is enjoyable and all around us.
So, what can the parent do to help? We have to work on changing our own preconceived notions about education, learning and school. I hear about many parents taking their kids out of school, recreating the same forced learning environment at home, only to have it come to a crashing halt with the mom feeling like a failure and the kids being miserable. Maybe, if they would have given themselves, and their children, some time to deschool, it would have turned out different for all of them.
My husband Billy & I started reading John Taylor Gatto
even before removing our children from school. That was the start of my deschooling. I started to become aware of my thoughts on public school, real learning and education. And I started to question those thoughts. Thoughts that I had always accepted, without question because “that’s the way it’s always been done.”
I had been a “good” student (except in high school when all hell broke loose), meaning I did what I was told and made good grades. I wasn’t picked on, I had friends and got along with the teachers. But it was the thoughts about real life and real learning that I got from school that did the most damage.
I remember having to take a cooking class in junior high school. I hated it and got a very low grade on my report card. There it was, in black & white…I failed at cooking. Surprise, surprise…today, I hate cooking and have no confidence in my ability to cook something edible. (Although this serves me well because Billy does 99% of the cooking-lol). Someone, who never met me, decided it was time for me to learn to cook, and because I wasn’t interested at that time and found it boring, I was labeled “poor” in cooking. I never gave it any thought until I started deschooling. It wasn’t like it crushed me when I got my report card. Rather it confirmed that the reason I must have found the class boring was because I wasn’t good at it.
I began questioning why we, as parents, allow the school system to continue having control over our children when the school day ends. I’ve had teachers give me weekly lists of things for my children to do at home. I’ve heard many parents tell their kids “You can’t go out (or play) until you do your homework”. Suppose I want to do something with my family and homework is interfering with that? Why are they telling my children what to do when they’re in their own home?
I questioned why we’re expected to live by school policy at home. There had been many times when my children come home, the day before the standardized tests, and let me know that the teacher told the class to tell their parents that they need to eat a good breakfast the next morning. And then hand me a list of what exactly the school’s version of a good breakfast consists of. Why does the school system think they can dictate what parents and children do at home? Because we let them do it. Yes, WE LET THEM.
Once these thoughts started swirling around in my mind, there was no going back to my old way of thinking. I also started to become aware of other people’s thoughts about learning and education. Soon after I removed my kids from school, we ran into a friend and her son. It was close to the end of the school year and the mother asked if we “take a break for the summer”. I explained that we learn all the time and that learning is all around us. I went on to say that it would be like taking a break from breathing. As they walked away I heard her say to her son , “See, they have to do school work every single day, even in summer!”.
*sigh*
I recall a parent, of a schooled child, asking me how my kids do P.E. being they’re not in school. Who in their right mind would depend on the public school system for physical activity? It’s as if physical activity is only a subject, to be taken just at times that the school dictates. Ridiculous!
I also did a lot of reading during that first year of deschooling. My two main sources were the message board at unschooling.com which are now closed and Sandra Dodd’s site. I read almost everything on both sites and I could feel my thoughts and perspective changing as I read more and more.
Although that was back in 2004, I feel like my deschooling is a work in progress. I’ve learned so much about myself that it became more of a spiritual awakening than anything related to school. School-speak seems like a foreign language to me now. I see what REAL learning is everyday with my children.
It looks nothing like school.
*originally written in 2004: updated in 2008*
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Published by
Joanne on
January 12, 2010
** This was written two years ago (2008) on my 45th birthday. My 47th birthday is approaching in two weeks and I wanted to revisit this while I continue to update my blog posts after my move from blogger.com.**
*~~ Today is my birthday and I’m 45 years old. ~~*
I’ve always enjoyed gaining another year under my belt. Even the supposed hard ones, like turning 30 or 40, were welcomed with open arms. I wore each year proudly, almost like a badge of honor.
This is the first year that it’s difficult, but not because of the number 45. Difficult because it’s my first time having a birthday without my mother here with me. (Actually, it’s my first birthday without either of my parents, my father passed away 20 years ago).
Throughout my life, my mother I always had a very strong and close connection. She was my mother and my friend and I miss her so much. I always shared my birthday with her because it was “our” day. I always bought flowers for her on my birthday, as a thank you for having me. This year I’ll buy them and place them near her urn. I think that will make me feel better than not buying them at all.
I’ve learned some valuable life lessons so far and I look forward to learning more in the next 45 years.
45 things I’ve learned in the first 45 years of my life.
1. Time may heal most wounds, but not all.
2. Love is not always the answer
3. Life is what you make it.
4. Real friends come through for you when you need them the most.
5. The public school system in this country sucks and is getting worse every day.
6. Unschooling rocks!
7. Hurt people hurt others.
8. We are all connected
9. Religion does more to separate people than bring them together.
10. Hard rock is best served LOUD.
11. Biology doesn’t make a family.
12. Chocolate does make things better
13. My mother was right when she said “This too shall pass”
14. People may try to hang their baggage on you…don’t let them.
15. When people come together, in the wake of a tragedy, it’s a beautiful thing to be part of. (RIP to all the souls killed on September 11, 2001)
16. Change is growth
17. Dogs are great friends
18. Don’t listen to the attendant – lift those hands up when you’re on a roller coaster!
19. Al Sharpton truly is a jackass.
20. There are times in our life when we just have to move on.
21. Always, always listen to your gut instinct.
22. Take responsibility for what you say
23. Take responsibility for your actions.
24. Sometimes revenge feels good
25. It’s a good idea to take a deep breathe before saying something you might regret
26. Some people come in to your life for a short time but you remember them forever.
27. Never gossip about someone in a public restroom.
28. Doctors do not always know what their talking about.
29. DCF/CPS/DSS does not always have the best interest of the child at heart.
30. Learning is everywhere
31. Being the white parent of two brown skinned children, I’ve found racism in places I wouldn’t expect.
32. I am a REAL parent. If you ask me where my kids real parents are, I’m going to slap you.
33. My kids are my REAL kids. If you ask me why I don’t have kids “of my own”, I’m going to slap you again.
34. People who say #32 and #33 are misinformed about adoption and have no idea what they’re talking about.
35. I’ve never been mainstream or traditional
36. I have met some really cool people through the internet.
37. I will never be a follower.
38. New York City is the best place on earth
39. My husband will always be a 16 year old at heart
40. Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission (thanks Elenore Roosevelt)
41. Just because you’ve always done something a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s the right way
42. If I don’t write it down, I’ll forget it.
43. Animals deserve to be treated with respect
44. I feel at home in a book store
45. Life is short – make the most of it
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