Fifteenth Anniversary!

Images and parts of the text are links.

First post, with some nice comments, from 2010:

This would need more candles now, but...



May the richness and riches of this trove of words and photos seep into your soul and give you sweet dreams and good ideas.

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With this, there are 5,343 posts. A few were deleted in the past for lacking longevity (announcements, temporary info). Some have been repeated for being especially good. They are labelled four ways, to keep it from being one big label/tag, so if you would like to see some "greatest hits," these are clickable, and are called

again (72 of those)

again! (147)

re-run (151)

repeat (136)

For today, then, if those are excluded, there are 4,837 non-repeated posts. Still around 5,000.

Most posts link to an unschooling page or two on my website. Most of those pages link back to this blog (from a little link in the upper right corner).

If you would like to help fund the maintenance of that site (from which most of the quotes come), there is a donation link at SandraDodd.com (which can also be accessed from this image on most of the unschooling pages:


The donation link is halfway down there. It's PayPal, debit or credit.

I can accept checks or Christmas cards to:

Sandra Dodd
8116 Princess Jeanne NE
Albuquerque NM 87110     USA

(If cool foreign money, save it there; consider photo request below!)

Also useful would be photos for the collection from which I try to pull a match for a text. Not all get used and some get used very late, but it's nice to have a variety. Send just a few you love, so I'm not overwhelmed, and tell me how to credit you (full name or truncated how). Those can go by messenger or by e-mail to Sandra@SandraDodd.com (and larger files are fine).

SandraDodd.com
tree art by Bo King
cake photo by Sandra Dodd
photos by many different people at the repeat/again links

P.S. I want the website to last a long time, so if I'm not able to collect funding assistance someday, maybe find Holly Dodd or Vlad Gurdiga and see if they need financial help keeping it going. It's a bit less than $20 a month these days; might go up as things might do. Thanks.

Seeing; doing; being

Jenny Cyphers wrote:

In the newer days years ago, what helped more than anything else was to actually see my kids and what they were actually doing. I would try to see the world from their eyes and see how they lit up and give them more of that. Just being with them and enjoying them for who they were regardless of what they were doing, watching tv, playing dress up, whatever helped keep my energy focused on them, rather than on fear of what they weren't or weren't doing.

—Jenny Cyphers

original writing, at Always Learning
photo by Sadie Bugni

Safety and communication

My children have no reason to dodge or manipulate..., because Keith and I haven't concocted any made-up arbitrary rules and their accompanying punishments. With safety and communication as principles and priorities, we've had safe, communicative kids.

page 46 (or 50) of The Big Book of Unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd

P.S.: That probably only works only if you begin very early.
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"I told him already."

Not lately, but once upon a time...

...When the triangles come up on Math Arena, I have to think "isosceles" and then look for one (or "right" or "equilateral" or "obtuse" or whatever). Holly doesn't have to.

So my strewing plan was this: The next morning I would wake up early, make tea, and get out the geoboards. We have three. I would set up three basic triangles. When Holly got up and noticed these out, I would point at the hypotenuse on the right triangle. Either she would say "huh!" and "Would you make Malt-o-Meal?" and it would be over, or she might ask "And what are these other two?" Maybe it would be a couple of days of playing with triangles and maybe it will be one little "huh!"

That was my whole plan. I was going to be fine with however minor or glorious it was, because I knew she would have something to tie it to in her head, another dot to connect, and all that internal triangulation would be more valuable than any vocabulary study and formulaic recitation we could do.

But what happened was that I forgot to check back on my geo-board kid-trap. When I remembered in the early afternoon, Marty and Holly were working on fancy designs with colored rubber bands, and making "how many triangles?" puzzles for each other to count triangles within triangles. I came over and said, "That is a hypotenuse," and I pointed right at a green rubber hypotenuse. Holly said, "I know, I told him already." Not only had I missed my big chance to review it with her, she (at twelve) had already explained it to her brother (the fifteen year old).

SandraDodd.com/dot/hypotenuse
photo by Julie Daniel, of Adam, also not recent
(I couldn't find a geoboard photo)

Unexpectedly...

Gail Higgins, an unschooling mom, wrote of this photo: "Opossum staredown. Surprise photo op 😀"


It reminds me of those unexpected moments that pop up in any parent's life. Unexpectedly, someone is looking at you expectantly. It could be one of your children, your partner, a relative, a neighbor, a friend or a stranger.

Confidence in unschooling principles will make those moments increasingly easy to deal with. After becoming an unschooler, one can respond as an unschooler. It does take a while.

As Gail's confidence in her photographic skills increases, she can respond as a photographer, when surprises come along.

SandraDodd.com/becoming
photo by Gail Higgins
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Bright and sparkly

Jenny Cyphers wrote:

Intellectually, I got unschooling all the way from the very beginning. The part that took more time was relationships and wholeness. When I got THAT, that is when things started happening in the direction that made unschooling work great!

The way I see it, often, is that there are multiple facets that make unschooling work best. The two biggest facets that go hand in hand for me are the absence of school and school think, combined with real working relationships with my kids. People can go and do one or the other and not let them overflow into each other, but it won't be as bright and sparkly, with the facet analogy.

—Jenny Cyphers

SandraDodd.com/gettingit
photo by Karen James

Do more

If you think you haven't done enough for your children lately, do more.

Maintain and replenish
photo by Janine Davies