Languages, words, history

Whole language involves language as communication, rather than separate parts (writing/reading/spelling). First language, then details later.

With unschooling, children will learn from the language you use and they use, from the words they see around them, from using games and computers, from signing greeting cards or playing with words. There's no need for any school-style structure at all. For those who have wondered about phonics and reading and spelling, please don't press that on your children.

Some languages are simpler than English in that the letters and sounds match pretty consistently. French and Spanish come to mind. German. But because of something that happened in 1066, and because of the history of The British Isles, and because of the isolation of some English speakers and the migration of many others, English has complexities and a crazy-large vocabulary. Our basic grammar and language are Germanic. The majority of our vocabulary is from French (look up 1066 if you don't remember what happened) and Latin, though the everyday words we use are from Anglo Saxon, which had borrowings from half a dozen Germanic dialects.

If that was a painful paragraph to read, never mind it. If that paragraph was fun for you, then you can help your children spell by looking up what language a word is from and figuring out why it looks the way it does in written English.

SandraDodd.com/phonics
photo by Caroline Lieber

A big if/then thought

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Some people, such as those who are naturally drawn to rules, who live under limitations accept the rules and stick to them. They live in fear and the rules are like talismans that will keep the boogeyman away. What happens when they are faced with new situations that they don't have rules in place for? People often extrapolate from the nonsense and extend the rules. But rational thought would reveal shoddy foundations for decision making.

If the reasons behind rules make sense, then there isn't a reason to make a rule. But people who follow rules aren't learning how to make decisions. They are only learning to follow someone else's rules.

If the reasons behind rules are nonsense, then people memorize nonsense and use that as a foundation for decision making.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/logic
photo by Theresa Larson

More than half

I've given this advice to newlyweds, and to my oldest child the first time he had a roommate:

Don't aim for 50/50.

If 50% is right, then 49% is wrong, and 65% would be something get angry about.

If you both aim for more than half, you'll meet around the middle, around half the time. If you want the other person to stick around, "around" is the goal.

SandraDodd.com/50/50
photo by Sandra Dodd

Already human

Look directly at your child without filters or labels. Even a newborn baby is the person she will be when she's grown up, and old.

Babies are not future humans. They are whole people. Help them remain whole and to grow up unmarred by sorrow and shame. My husband, Keith, said once, when someone asked him what we hoped to accomplish by unschooling, that we wanted our children to grow up undamaged.

SandraDodd.com/video/doright
photo by Cátia Maciel

Canada... dude!

I'm happy to know I'm not the sole source of information for my kids.

Last night I came to use my computer and there was a dialog on the desktop, a leftover instant message between my thirteen-year-old son Marty and an older homeschooler. This was the entirety of that dialog:

Marty: You coming down?
Other kid: yeah.
Marty: Did you know Canada has Prime Ministers?
Other kid: yeah
Marty: dude

Now I will never have to explain to Marty that Canada has a prime minister. I don't know why he cared, on a Friday night in New Mexico, but it doesn't matter.

Tales of Late-Night Learning
For the record, "last night" was in late 2002, and the other kid was Brett Henry, also unschooled, who is now a firefighter in the Los Alamos Fire Department. They've both become husbands and fathers, still learning for fun.

photo by Sandra Dodd

P.S. Since writing this, since taking that photo, I went to France and discovered that their stop signs say "Stop." Why, I asked my French host-mom, do they say "Arrêt" in Quebec? She said Quebec wants to be more French than France. One more bit of information that won't be on the test. Trivia.

One little choice at a time

Jen Keefe wrote:

I abandoned the stuff I thought we "had" to do and disrupted our peace, and filled it with stuff that made us happy. This was all one little choice, in the moment, at a time.

The healing and effect this has had on both my husband and me is immeasurable. Being the parent to my kids that I needed when I was younger has wrapped my own self in a comfort I never got to have before.

—Jen Keefe

SandraDodd.com/being/allin
photo by Cátia Maciel

Quirks

Lyle Perry wrote:

Quirks are what makes us individuals. What a boring world it would be without quirks. Everyone would know exactly how everyone else likes things because we would all like them the same. (What a horrible thought.)

The cool thing about unschoolers is that we get the chance to revel in our quirks, rather than hide them in fear of ridicule. And for the quirks that really do bother us, we have the opportunity to learn to deal with them without the pressures of society bearing down on us.

We have the gift of truly being ourselves.

— Lyle Perry

Conversations With Sandra Dodd (archived)
(sixth post down)
photo by Rosie Moon

Peace is all about choices.

If you want to live peacefully, make the most peaceful choices.

Peace is all about choices.

Choose to breathe consciously.
Choose understanding over ignorance.
Choose to make choices.
Choose awareness over oblivion.
And make choices based on the principles you live by.

SandraDodd.com/peace
photo and art by Marcia Simonds

Bonus!

If unschooling makes us hopeful, problem-solving people, what an unexpected bonus!

SandraDodd.com/unexpected
photo by Sandra Dodd
Bonus bonus: If you use green onions with roots still on, stick the white bottom parts in little containers in a windowsill, and they might keep growing for a while. Bonus onions! (Those went in just about 2" long, and I waited a week.)

What really matters

Meredith wrote:

I always wonder what people expect when they ask unschoolers what materials they use, since it's a question that does come up now and then, generally by academic homeschoolers but sometimes in a daycare context.... The flattering reason, I guess, is that they think we're all geniuses at "making learning fun" but it's ultimately the wrong question. There aren't any special materials. Our homes are full of normal things, commercial toys, cartoon pajamas and pokemon sippy cups, tvs and video games, with piles of things that need to be sorted and put away slumped in corners, or cluttering up the couch and stairs. Many families unschool on slim material resources. The magic of unschooling is in the relationships.

—Meredith Novak

SandraDodd.com/partners
photo by Rachel Singer

"The magic of unschooling is in the relationships." —Meredith
(I repeated the last line because it's good.)

Peaceful rough-and-tumble

Connie Coyle wrote:

Something that I have seen with both gentle parenting and attachment parenting is that those ideas have been used as a means of coercion and control. No matter how you disguise it, some things are still controlling.

As with anything, I think that how a person defines certain things can have a big impact on whether or not it might interfere with unschooling. The closest example I can think of is the notion of gentle parenting getting in the way of a mom being rough and tumble and wild. If a kid is super physical and needs to get really rough, then a parent might shy away from that because it is not perceived as gentle. If my memory is correct, I think I have seen that brought up in conversations before.

I also thought of the page about peace on Sandra's site: Great Big Noisy Peace [SandraDodd.com/peace/noisy]

Gentle can be screwed up the same way as peaceful in that a person can gently control you and manipulate you.

—Connie Coyle

SandraDodd.com/otherideas
(Gentle parenting advice as a hindrance?)
photo by Christine Milne

Fun and wonderful

Once someone chose the subject line "Battle with candy", in a discussion, and one response was (from me):

The candy isn't fighting back. It's a battle with fear and control, if it's a battle at all. But it's not a battle with candy.

Also me, there:

A focus on what is fun and wonderful is better than a focus on discomfort. Candy can be fun and wonderful. A parent saying "no" and calling joy "strung out" isn't nearly as fun or as wonderful.

SandraDodd.com/positivity
photo by Cally Brown

Relationships, living and learning

Coming to unschooling from a rules-based point of view -- as most parents do -- it's natural to try to shape what's being written into rules.

But unschooling is:

Great relationships
Joyful living and learning

Some of the principles that support that are:

Trust
Respect
Kindness
Compassion
Helpfulness

Having someone help you get what you want is joyful. Even for adults. 🙂

—Joyce Fetteroll
2010 original topic
(Joyce wrote more, halfway down.)

Five Steps to Unschooling
photo by Alex Polikowsky

The value of joy

Parents and teachers Don't KNOW, when they look at a six-year-old, what fields of expertise will develop and be needed in the next twelve or twenty years.

The world is changing fast, and one of the best things kids can have is curiosity, openness to newness, and calm confidence that they can pursue their own interests.

If parents are looking at children's interests as school checklists, unschooling is escaping them. Often unschoolers look at children instead of looking more at their own beliefs, and their awareness of what learning looks like in the wild, and how valuable JOY is in a family.

The text was new in a discussion yesterday, but this is a better link:
How to Be a Good Unschooler
by Pam Sorooshian
photo by Christine Milne

Unfurling

Look at that curled up leaf:


Something that will be big, and full, sometimes starts small, and in another form. If conditions remain good for that leaf, it will open up like the others. It won't happen sooner from wishing or pressure. The leaf won't be bigger from speeches or promises. It will open gently to be itself, if it is allowed to unfurl in its own way.

SandraDodd.com/unschool/definition.html
photo by Holly Dodd

Magical and transformed

Parental encouragement, smiles, acceptance and support are what turn plain or unsettled life into magical and transformed shared lives.

Getting it
photo by Lisa J Haugen

Figuring out when and where

To a mom asking about why a store wouldn't let her kid climb on the employee's stairs, or ladder, I wrote:

Always saying no is bad.
NEVER saying no is just as bad.

Helping children figure out when and where they can do things is great.

YES children can run and should run, but ANYwhere? No.
YES children should be able to climb up and look around, but ANYwhere? No.

"Yes, somewhere else" can be a good answer, but then the parents need to find that somewhere else QUICKLY, soon, that day, not a month or a year later.

SandraDodd.com/partners/child
photo by Cathy Koetsier


see also Up

Integration

Joyce Fetteroll, from "Why You Can’t Let Go":

As kids fit pieces in one area of the puzzle, those pieces are also unconsciously fitting into other areas. And even better, the areas the piece fits into can provide feedback. So one area can set off an alarm if a child is about to add a piece to another area that doesn't make sense.

As an example, learning about hawks will add pieces to the carnivore area along with lots of other areas too. The carnivore area will also get pieces from cats and dogs and T. Rexes and sharks. That will build up images of carnivore behavior. So if a child hears "Hawks eat rice," that piece won't make sense in the carnivore area. The child's brain will scramble around looking for words that are in both the sounds-like-rice area and the carnivore area. They'll probably say, "Oh, mice!" Or, if they come up blank, "That can't be right!" Whatever they do, they won't just mindlessly accept some fact. They want the areas to work and want the areas to meet their needs.

Yes, there's double-checking with curriculum too. Kids won't just accept some obvious error like 2+2=5. But with natural learning they're motivated to question and understand. They're trying to meet their needs, after all. Not someone else's needs. Not some future needs they might have.

If you think about how your kids are learning English, you can see a working image of this puzzle building. English is an area of the real world puzzle. The more kids use English, the more pieces they add to the English puzzle area. But English is also a tool kids use to build other areas of the real world puzzle.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/talk
photo by Karen James

Sometimes yes

Sometimes saying yes is being patient a little longer than the schedule says you should. Sometimes being kind is not rushing toward or away from something. Sometimes magic, and learning, and memories, come from a patient, gentle, unspoken "yes."

SandraDodd.com/yesagain
photo by Sandra Dodd

Being fully with a child

For unschooling to work, parents need to stop looking into the future and live more in the moment with their real child. BEING with a child is being where the child is, emotionally and spiritually and physically and musically and artistically. Seeing where the child *is* rather than seeing a thousand or even a dozen places she is not.

SandraDodd.com/being/with
photo by Chrissy Florence