Kid Eats Apple

Catherine wrote once upon a time:

One for the "they'll never eat anything but junk" people—yesterday evening after we got back from trick or treating and I walked past my 5 y.o. sitting with her basket of candy at the table and noticed that one of the first things she had eaten was the apple she got from our next-door neighbor.

— Cat (Catherine Aceto)

SandraDodd.com/eating/halloween
photos by Kirby Dodd (top)
and Marty Dodd, 2026

Dressing up and BEING

Most children and many adults like to find chances to dress up, one way or another. When you have a chance to encourage and to help kids exercise their pretend play, please do!

If children tell you who they are, when they're being another character, try to play along.

Dress up and play
photo by Sandra Dodd, in 2010, of kids who are college-age now.

Random connections

Birds that begin with "K":

Bird photos by unschooling moms!

A kestrel and a kookaburro, found in my Just Add Light and Stir photo folder, and who remind me to encourage random-access world, and random-connection life!

SandraDodd.com/connections
photos by Karen James and by Christine Milne

Be prepared

Planning for snacks and having them handy can seem like patience.

Planning for clothing and having extra with you can seem like patience.

Having a map and directions and having the phone charged up and a flashlight and an umbrella can seem like patience.

Impatience is often the beacon of unpreparedness and the resulting embarrassment. Be prepared!

The quote is from the section called "Patience" in The Big Book of Unschooling
but this link has some other ideas: SandraDodd.com/patience
photo by Sandra Dodd,
of a jack-o-lantern designed by Devyn Dodd
(and cut mostly by me, when she was little)

Sun, or moon, or fire

Sometimes light is from an Aha!! lightbulb moment.
Sometimes light is more information, or seeing from a new angle, "in a new light."
Sometimes light is from the sun, or the moon, or a fire.
Sometimes light comes from just lightening up. (Not "lightning up," or "lighting up," so spelling will make a big difference, in those lights.)

Live lightly.

SandraDodd.com/angles
photo by Sandra Dodd

Parents exploring (deschooling)

Deschooling is not just the child recovering from school damage. It's also the parents exploring their own school and childhood damage and proactively changing their thinking until the paradigm shift happens.

—Robyn Coburn

How Deschooling Works
photo by Irene Adams

An Atmosphere of Learning

I'm an unschooler. Lessons are never over. On the other hand, lessons never really begin. Children's questions are answered and an atmosphere of learning is created so that questions are constant and answers are never far away.

SandraDodd.com/unschool/allkinds
photo by Sandra Dodd