This Week in Unschooling

This is unschooling this week: Recently I really got into the soundtrack of the Broadway musical Hamilton, and after lamenting that I wish I could just see the storyline so I’d understand better what was going on when I listened, my husband Brad found this this video, and we watched the whole thing. Since then, […]

Enjoy Summer THEN GET BACK TO WORK

One of the local elementary schools is in my neighbourhood, so I pass by their sign board relatively often. Over the summer, this is the message they had up: And I thought it was cool how, in principle anyway, we seem to have shared values. The difference, I suppose, is in application. Their admonition to […]

Lemonade

Let’s get schooly for a moment. Not that I think spending your life comparing yourself to others is a great plan, but when you’re living alternatively, occasionally getting schooly has its benefits. It can help to validate one’s own choices, and help others to understand said choices, by speaking their language. I come in peace. […]

Hypocrisy and All of It

Here’s a thing about unschoolers: we are an incredibly amorphous group. You can’t even fairly call us a group–we have no leader, no rule book; we’re all over the map. All we have are ideas. Sure, those ideas started with one man, who put them into some great books, but there’s still about a million ways to […]

Strewing

Today I got the first Life of Fred math book, “Apples”, back from a friend who’d borrowed it, because five-year-old L had asked to start reading them together. I haven’t read them at all since November when I finally noticed I was killing the joy of math in E by pushing it. I think the […]

Interest-Based Learning

Sometimes unschoolers will describe what they do as “interest-based learning”. It’s a quick, easy to understand phrase that satisfies the casually curious without triggering shock and confusion. It’s not the totality of what makes unschooling…well, unschooling, but it’s accurate that interest-based learning is a key component to the philosophy. I have learned, though, that while […]