1) You address a lot of the day to day in your blog, but what are the biggest hurdles to starting?

For me, it was changing the way I view education, school and learning. Real learning…learning that truly means something to an individual. Learning has nothing to do with passing or failing, dividing the world up into subjects or taking a standardized test. That’s not learning.

Education is not telling students that it’s June 1 and today is the day you need to learn about dolphins. Also, when you’re done “learning”, you’re going to be tested to see if you can regurgitate all the facts back. And if you do, bingo!…you’ve learned!

For me, seeing the learning in everything and not dividing the world up into educational and not educational has been very helpful. In Guerrilla Learning, by Grace Llewellyn she says;

“Real learning requires meaning. Meaningless information can be memorized and repeated, but it’s not learning. For information to have meaning, there must be meaningful context for the information. That’s why most people, unless they are really good at absorbing and retaining meaningless data, forget most of what they learned in school.In school, subjects are artificially separated from each other. It’s as if schools believe that if you give kids one tree at a time, year after year, they will save them up and make a forest out of them. School can sap kids interest in learning, confuse them with so many meaningless “trees” that it may take years to recover and begin to see the “forest” again. School can simply eat up so much of their time that there’s none left for the real learning, for spontaneous exploration or free play. Instead of discovering their unique gifts and talents, many learn to see themselves as “disabled” if they don’t keep up with the traditional school systems standards of measurement.”

2) And what are the unexpected benefits you find along the way?

For my children, one of the unexpected benefits is how they (especially my youngest) are starting to question things more. They’re interested in knowing things. They’re curious. They’re starting to see that learning is not something you do just to pass a test. For me, an unexpected benefit was how much I would change through this journey.

3) How has homeschooling helped your children blossom?

Unschooling is allowing them to be free and they’re blossoming in that freedom. They’re starting to become more sure of themselves, which isn’t hard to do when you’re not in school. There’s nobody telling them that they’re failures so their confidence in themselves is soaring. They are starting to see that life is not sectioned into educational and not educational and that they’re interests take them places that school could never dream of.

**originally posted in 2007**

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“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 what Jacqueline was doing. When I told her she said
something to the effect of “Maybe she’ll be a writer when she grows up”. To which I replied, “She already is a writer”. She paused (and you could see the light bulb going off) as she thought about that, and said “Yes! She is a writer”.

That little shift in thinking has been very helpful to me in unschooling my kids. What she’s doing now is valid and important, not because it may help her when she becomes an adult, not because she may choose that as her career, but because it brings her joy and makes her happy now, right now. She is not an “adult in the making”. She’s exactly where she should be.

So without further ado, here is Jacqueline’s story. She is already working on her second one, which I’ll post when she’d done.

Princess Barbie
by Jacqueline Anne (a 7 year old unschooler)
2006

I love being a princess.” Said Barbie.

Barbie’s tutor came in and said “Princess the queen sent for you”. “Where is she?” said Barbie. “In the throne room” said Ken. Barbie went to the Throne room.
There the queen sat. “Come my dear” said the queen. Barbie hugged the queen. Barbie was surprise to see royal page.

Soon Barbie was heading back to her room when she heard a cry. It was the royal page yelling invader!
“Invader?” asked the princess.
“Yes” said the royal page. “We must hide” said royal page.
So they hid. The invaders lost. They were safe.
The Royal page was nice.

The End.

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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 farthest. Looks like Shawna won.

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In our unschooling family, learning is nothing that’s separated, categorized, planned, judged, graded, or forced. It’s just a natural, joyful part of all of our lives.

Because real, natural learning is in the living. It’s in the observing, the questioning, the examining, the pondering, the analyzing, the watching, the reading, the DO-ing, the living, the breathing, the loving, the Joy.

Real learning happens when our children make real connections that have meaning in their real lives. Real learning is not what we were told it was. It’s necessary for us, as unschooling parents, to make a shift in our perception of what constitutes learning. That’s sometimes difficult for parents to do, because our old definition of education and learning is so deeply ingrained in our society and in us.

So in order to make that shift, we first just need get out our erasers and clear away the old crap ~ because real learning is buried under that school definition of learning. Erase that away, and then shift your focus.

Focus on that connection with your True Self and focus on allowing your children the freedom to connect with their True Selves. Focus on that second connection ~ connecting with each other. Focus on living. Living joyfully. Live a full, rich, connected life with your children.
Focus on the Joy and allow your children to focus on the Joy. They are constantly and joyfully and effortlessly making connections within their own minds and hearts. Their body of knowledge that they possess within themselves has the chance to grow every day. What does that mean? It means with unschooling, they’re learning every day!

We also need to erase away the harmful fallacy that learning is something that can be forced. Real learning is nothing that can be forced upon another person. The connections have to originate within themselves. It has to come from that first connection. Otherwise, it’s not real learning. It’s temporarily memorizing something in order to pass the test.

John Holt once said in an interview, “Children are interested in the world, as far as they are able to get into contact with it.”

That’s our job. To put before our children as much of the world as we can.

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