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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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 out how to bring the capsule back to Earth. Jacqueline asked Billy to pause the movie at a scene that showed the paper they were writing on so she could get a good look at it. She wanted to know what they were doing and what type of math that was.

This started an ongoing discussion about algebra and calculus and since then she’s been asking Billy to explain it to her. He told her that he would look around for a book because he needed to brush up on it himself before he could explain it to her.

That was a couple of months ago and because of other issues going on in our life, he hadn’t gotten around to buying the book yet.

Taking matters into her own hands, (my mother always said – when there’s a will, there’s a way) Jacqueline spotted an algebra text book in a used book store and bought it with her own money.

The other night she asked Billy to read her a bedtime story and when he walked into her room, there she was…all cozy in bed with Sally, the bear she created at Build-A-Bear. She handed Billy the book she had selected…yup, the algebra textbook. She also had a notebook so she could jot down notes.

I couldn’t resist a picture.

Have I mentioned how much I love unschooling recently?

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“What exactly 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 “school-at-home” nor do we gives tests or grades.
Unschooling accepts all learning as valid. Everything is connected. You never know when one thing will lead to or connect with another! Unschoolers know they *do* and will keep searching for those connections.
Unschooling is natural learning. Humans are hard-wired to learn-we crave it and seek it out. When you believe that, you’re half-way to understanding how it works.
Unschooling is understanding the difference between teaching and learning. That’s a HUGE hurdle to overcome before you can “get” unschooling. (I can *teach* you everything *I* know about unschooling, but unless you’re willing to *learn* it, I’m wasting my time and your time.)
All children can unschool.
Many parents can’t.
Unschooling requires a “paradigm shift” to make it work. And it works best when you (the parent) are an active learner. And curious and thoughtful and enthusiastic and interested and interesting.
It’s about trust and respect and patience.
It helps if you can step OUT of the box. If you’re OK going against the flow and standing up for yourself (or at least your child).

**originally posted in 2006**

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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 traditional school advocates. Ms. Puckett keeps her children at home for their education, but she doesn’t have a textbook in the house. Instead, she follows the philosophy of letting the child decide each day what activities to pursue—or avoid.

On a typical day, Ms. Puckett’s children—who range in age from 4 to 17 and have never gone to a traditional school—might watch a few hours of television, read the Bible, amuse themselves with video games, play with their siblings, practice the violin, or learn Russian. On many days, they’re out of the house visiting museums, going to concerts, or attending theatrical plays.

“I believe that each child is gifted, but each has different gifts,” said Ms. Puckett, who sees it as her job to help facilitate the learning that her children choose. “When I see them veering toward something, I guide them toward it. If they’re showing no interest, then we don’t do it.” This child-led method of home schooling means that what children do during a typical school day is entirely up to them.

In an era of increased standardized testing, top-down curricula, and the mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, unschooling is attractive to some parents, who say learning should be a more organic, curiosity-inspired exercise. Advocates say it allows children to become passionate about, and invested in, their own learning.
Risks Involved But critics, including some of those who opt for more-structured home schooling and proponents of “child centered” classrooms in regular schools, say that there are risks involved, and that learning deficits can result from letting children basically learn whatever they want.

The term “unschooling” was coined by the late John Holt, one of the godfathers of the home-schooling movement, who wrote a stack of books about alternative ways of educating children. Mr. Holt first used the word in 1977 and equated it with home schooling. The term resonated with many home-schooling parents who didn’t want to use traditional methods, such as textbooks and organized subjects, to educate their children, said Patrick Farenga, the president of Holt Associates, based in Wakefield, Mass. Mr. Farenga took over leadership of the company, a home schooling publishing and advocacy organization, when Mr. Holt died in 1985. Unschooling should not mean “schooling without a plan,” Mr. Farenga said in an interview. “It’s self-directed learning. I define unschooling as allowing children as much freedom to explore the world as you can comfortably bear.”

Brian D. Ray, the president of the Salem, Ore.-based Home Schooling Institute, estimates that 10 to 15 percent of the 1.9 to 2.4 million K-12 children being home-schooled in the United States also fall into the unschooling category, also sometimes called “relaxed home schooling.” “We’re talking about people who purposely, intentionally, philosophically make learning an integral and organic part of everyday life,” he said.

State laws on home schooling also pertain to unschooling and vary considerably around the country, Mr. Ray said. Some states require home-schooled children to take several standardized tests during their K-12 years. Other states have few or no requirements of home-schoolers, he said. For instance, in Washington state, where Ms. Puckett’s family lives, the law requires that home-schooled students take an annual achievement test, though they’re not required to meet a particular educational achievement target, according to a listing of each state’s requirements compiled by Home Education Magazine, a bi-monthly magazine about home schooling that has been around since 1983. Connecticut asks that parents who engage in home schooling file an annual plan for their child’s education and meet once a year with local education officials to review the plan. Pennsylvania requires that home-schooling parents provide at least 180 days of instruction and maps out what subjects must be taught. Pennsylvania also requires annual testing and detailed documentation from parents to prove instruction is occurring.

Sandra Dodd, a longtime advocate of unschooling who lives in Albuquerque, N.M., and whose two children never attended a traditional school, said when her oldest child was of school age she believed he was already soaking up more on his own than he would in kindergarten. “If you don’t separate the world into educational and noneducational, your child wants to learn everything, so everything around them is what he’s learning from,” she said. “They’re learning in natural, real world ways, the way you learn to drive or cook or sew.”

‘Less Structured Place’ Unschoolers argue that if a child is intrigued by a book, for example, they don’t have to quit reading it to make way for a science lesson; or if they love dinosaurs, they can study them for weeks at a time, and visit museums to bolster the experience.

Jane Powell, a Bowie, Md., mother of four children who practices unschooling, said she never taught her oldest son, now 9, to read. He learned how to read by playing video games, she said. “As he was playing his games, he was asking me to read, so I was reading what he needed. Then he was asking me less and less frequently, and then it stopped. … He learned to read,” she said. “I didn’t teach him. I didn’t prod him. I didn’t give him any helpful shoves in the appropriate direction. He learned to read when he was ready.”

Likewise, Ms. Dodd said she never taught her children mathematics by using worksheets or word problems. Her children learned math by figuring out how many weeks of allowance it would take to save up for a certain toy, by calculating percentage discounts on items at stores, and by estimating tips at restaurants, she said. Ms. Dodd said her son, at his own request, took his first formal math class at age 18 at a local community college. When he took the initial placement test, she had to explain to him that multiplication could be represented by an X or by a dot or by a parenthesis. He scored well on the initial test, she said and by the end of the class he had pushed his scores even higher, she said. With unschooling, “how you learn something is because you want to learn it,” Ms. Dodd said, adding that her children have been able to follow their own interests—rather than a list of subjects determined by others. “My kids have had a glorious full life of absence of school,” she said. Of course, those from more traditional education circles worry that such free-form education could make it difficult for a child to adjust as an adult to the more structured world of college or work.

But Ms. Noddings of Stanford, despite her reservations about unschooling, believes just the opposite. “Perhaps these kids may help the world be a less miserable and less structured place,” she said. “Perhaps they’ll have something to say against the overly bureaucratic system we have now.”

Different Approaches To those who have chosen unschooling, Mr. Farenga of Holt Associates said, the method can take a variety of forms. He doesn’t espouse any particular way of unschooling, but “some parents take a very laissez-faire approach,” while others choose more structure, he said. Ms. Puckett, for example, limits her children to two hours a day of television time, a practice that makes some of the more extreme unschoolers wince. “Unschooling is not unparenting,” Ms. Puckett said. “My choice is that too much TV is not good for their brains, and it inhibits their natural curiosity.”

Ms Dodd, on the other hand, said her family has TVs and video games in many rooms, and her children’s time using them is not limited. More often than not, though, the TVs will be off because her children find more creative and interesting things to do, she said.

** Originally posted in 2007 **

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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 cartoons, star trek, storytelling, space, spy kids and stellaluna.

C is for CHOICES. “You’ve got a lot of choices. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you’re not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice”. -Steven D. Woodhull

H is for HOME…our haven…our headquarters.

O is for OUTSIDE! We spend as much time as we want with friends at the park, swimming in our pool, watching the clouds, riding bikes and looking at bugs.

O is for OUTER SPACE – Jacqueline’s passion for space has taken her in many directions like our trip to the Kennedy Space Center where she got to meet an real astronaut, the Orlando Science Center where she viewed Jupiter through a telescope and building a replica of the Apollo rocket with her daddy.

L is for LATE morning sleeping.

** originally posted in 2007**

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1. Give yourself some time to deschool.
Letting go preconceived notions about school and learning is a gift you can give yourself, and your children. My own deschooling is a work in progress and the more I see unschooling first hand, the more I question what I once thought about education and learning.

2. Expect a period of deschooling from your children.
It’s been said that one month per every year of school is common. As I said in a previous post about deschooling, “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”.

3. Let your children feel your energy and passion for life. Light a fire within yourself and let it burn so brightly that they see it! What are your interests? Is there something you’ve always wanted to learn? Do It! Let them see YOU learning and living life to the fullest. Be curious. Be interested in life.

4. Don’t make the mistake of duplicating at home, what you didn’t like about school. Sometimes we just automatically repeat the same patterns, without even thinking about it, just because it’s all we know, it’s what we’re used to or it’s what we’ve always done. Replace school with a full and interesting life. The public school system can not compete with that. They can’t even come close.

5. Don’t make cookies to teach math.
Make cookies because they taste good.

*originally posted in 2007*

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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 to their home in St. John, where they spend the rest of the day watching TV, navigating XBox, working on art projects and playing games.

It is just another day in the Schiessle household, where the children learn through a branch of homeschooling called unschooling.

While the definition of unschooling varies, it generally reflects a concept of child-led learning.

For Carol Pozos’ oldest child, it meant self-taught reading at age 4.
For 18-year-old Abby Stewart of Chicago, it meant the recent news that she had won early admission to Princeton.

“It’s an awareness that learning is always happening because it’s part of living,” said Jane Van Stelle Haded of Hobart, who unschools her two children. “It’s almost trying to capitalize on whatever your children are interested in.”

Unschooled children don’t go to school, but unlike other homeschoolers they don’t necessarily learn through workbooks, educational guides or study sources. Instead, the children pursue what interests them. The unschooling concept has been around for decades, but it’s been slow to catch on, as initially most parents shy away from letting their children have such control over their own education.

“I’m trying to get rid of the idea that learning happens at a certain time in a certain place,” Van Stelle Haded said.

There aren’t any statistics on unschoolers yet, but the popularity of unschooling is reflected in the number of message boards on the Internet, in the abundance of unschooling clubs, in the frequency of unschooling conferences and in the slow but steady movement of unschooling into the vocabulary of educators.

Part of the increased attention on alternative education may be the rebellion against educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind. It was one of the reasons Janna Odenthal of Chesterton embraced unschooling for her child. “The testing doesn’t do any good,” she said.
In a 2003 survey by the U.S. Department of Education, the number of children educated at home nationally was 1.1 million, an increase of 29 percent from the previous study in 1999.

Seth Odenthal, 10, has been unschooled since he was about 5.
“I went ahead and gave it a try, and I fell in love with the things we could do together, the flexibility in our schedule,” his mother said. When Seth took an early interest in cooking and baking, Odenthal embraced his curiosity, and the two of them cook together. She even signed him up for a local cooking class. Seth never formally learned math, but Odenthal said he excels at it because it’s a natural progression from his cooking interests.

Indiana doesn’t require the unschoolers to take standardized tests, and parents are allowed to give their unschooled children high school diplomas when the parents believe the children are ready to graduate.

Since education laws in Indiana are loose, parents of unschoolers can take different approaches to learning. But most tend to have a few common practices. Students don’t sit at desks to learn, as parents believe learning happens all the time. And while they aren’t taught how to read or write or do science, the children usually ask their parents enough questions that they eventually learn on their own.

“My oldest was reading on her own without being taught before she turned 5,” said Carol Pozos, who unschools her three children in her Michigan City home. “I did not do anything except read to her, and she soaked it up and was reading full sentences. I thought to myself, ‘Obviously, this works.’ ” Pozos, who has a degree in elementary education, enrolled one of her children in preschool because the child had been begging her to go to school since she was 3. But when her daughter refused to return to school halfway through the year, Pozos decided to try teaching her children herself. Her children are 8, 7 and 4, and other than a half-year of preschool, all three have been learning at home their entire lives. They also have chores they’re required to do every morning.

And once they finish their chores? “We do whatever we want,” said 8-year-old Isabel, who spent a recent afternoon on the floor of her living room flipping through a picture book with her 4-year-old brother. On Thursday mornings the children attend an art class filled with unschoolers and their parents. “Books are out, and if they want to draw they can draw,” Pozos said of the class. “If they don’t want to participate, they can go off in the corner and play.”

To prepare for the SAT college admission tests, 18-year-old unschooler Abby Stewart bought some test prep books and took some old subject matter tests. She posted an overall SAT score of 2,350 out of a possible 2,400.

Pozos said she’d be happy if her children went to college, as long as they are happy with their decision. “I’m not one of those people who says, ‘I want my son to be a doctor and my daughter to be an attorney.’ I just want them to be happy. If Armand wants to be a stay-at-home dad and Isabel wants to be a marine biologist, that’s just fine.”

**originally posted in 2007**

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I’ve found this to be true sometimes, not so much from family but from friends and people that we meet while out and about. I’d like to share the reply I posted on the e-mail group. It was written with my daughter Jacqueline in mind. (note: This post was originally written in 2007 when Jacqueline was 9 years old.)

Dear Friend,

Please don’t talk down to Jacqueline when you speak with her. Your eyes may see only a young child, but I see a person who is interesting and knowledgeable in many areas. If you give her half a chance you may learn something that you didn’t know before you met her.

Ask her what she’s interested in and she’ll tell you all about the Mars Odyssey satellite. Ask her what she did today and she’ll tell you how she fixed her grandmothers VCR…after her daddy called her to ask for help. Talk a bit longer and she’ll tell you the Barbie story she wrote, and what her next story is going to be about.

Ask her about her life and she’ll tell you that she’s a four year Girl Scout, that she met an astronaut at the Kennedy Space Center and that she has her own plant at her grandmothers house (which is next door) that she waters every other day.

Also, if you’re going to ask her why she’s not in school, be prepared for her to tell you she dropped out in the first grade. She has her daddy’s sense of humor. Don’t look shocked. Laugh instead. She’s being funny.

Speak to her like a human being and she’ll speak to you the same way.

Sincerely,
Jacqueline’s mommy.

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