So You Want to Unschool?

Check out this video series from the lovely Laurie A. Couture. Here’s video one of six. © 2011 An Unschooling Life Share Tags: Laurie Couture, radical unschooling, unschooling encouragement, what is unschooling, youtube Related posts What Is Unschooling? (5) Unschooling Interview (13) Unschooling Article From Education Week (0) S

Unschooling Interview

A few months ago, a student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism contacted me and asked if they could interview me about unschooling for research they were doing. Here are her questions, and my answers. 1) You address a lot of the day to day in your blog, but what are the biggest hurdles to starting unschooling? For me, it was changing the way I view education, school and learning. Real learning…learning...

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 Math Concepts Without School

**originally posted in 2007** My nine year old daughter wants to be an astronaut and she’s passionate about astronomy and space. I’ve learned more about the solar system from her than I ever did in in all my years in school. A few months ago, she and my husband (I call them the two space cadets  -lol) were watching Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks and there’s a scene where they were using math concepts to figure...

What Is Unschooling?

Kelly Lovejoy posted this on an unschooling e-mail list a while back. She was answering someone’s question, which was; “Exactly what is unschooling? I thought it was another name for homeschooling”. All poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles. All unschooling is homeschooling, but all homeschooling isn’t unschooling. Unschooling is legally a type of homeschooling. Unschoolers don’t...

Unschooling Article From Education Week

‘Unschooling’ Stresses Curiosity More Than Traditional Academics By Michelle R. Davis As yellow school buses rumble through Nicole Puckett’s Spokane, Wash., neighborhood, her eight children are often asleep in bed. When they wake up, instead of heading to school, they go downstairs to begin another day of “unschooling”, an educational approach that is the subject of much debate among home-schoolers and...

U-N-S-C-H-O-O-L

U is for all of US because unschooling involves all of us, as a family. It’s not just all about the kids. N is for NOTEBOOKS…both the electronic and the paper kind. They’re both staples in our lives. Shopping lists, notes to each other, writing stories, drawing cartoons, daddy’s ever growing to-do list, phone numbers and much, much more. S is for spyro, star wars, saddle club books, saturday morning...

My Five Best Homeschooling Tips

I’ve been a homeschooling (unschooling actually) mama since 2004 and I’ve made some “mistakes” along the way, but I always tried to look at them as a learning experience. When the Pass The Torch blog asked homeschoolers for their best tips, I decided to share five of my best ones. 1. Give yourself some time to deschool. Letting go preconceived notions about school and learning is a gift you can give...

Courier Journal Unschooling Article

‘Unschooling’ popularity grows: Children pursue what interests them As other children are waking up and heading toward the school bus on a Tuesday morning, Adele Schiessle asks her children if they want to spend the day playing on a 6,000-square-foot indoor inflatable play area. Collin, 6, and Amber, 7, agree that would be a pleasant way to start the morning. After they play on the bouncy furniture, they head back...