Just Add Light and Stir

Someone wrote: I guess I need more reassurance so it doesn't seem like such a huge gamble. I responded: Would school seem ...

List five things you learned after the age of twelve that you learned totally outside of school. Try to think of three friends wh...

Sometimes I want to whine. Sometimes I do. It never helps. When making a conscious decision about how to respond or how to re...

Learning and changing is fun. It's healthy. It's useful. SandraDodd.com/authentic photo by Alex Polikowsky

If people are living by rules, it's nearly impossible to tell what it would look like to live by principles. Once one is living ...

Can they go to college/university? I've never heard of anyone being turned away from higher education because they were homesch...

In April 2013, Stephanie Meloche wrote: My son is interested in underground sewers. He's building a large network of sewers in ...

Joyce Fetteroll wrote: Unschooling is trusting in a child's natural curiosity to teach them what they need to know. The parent i...

Nicole wrote: Thank you for the ways you have helped me embrace abundance and the positive impact this has on my family. I am enteri...

Find ways to relax, rather than to struggle. A nice outside metaphor for this is Devil's Snare, invented by J. K. Rowling for...

Writing is thinking clearly. For unschoolers writing will be helped by a kid having the confidence that if someone asks him about a...

To get to the kinds of relationships being advocated here, a mom needs to let go of many things, two of which are the image of the per...

Ben Lovejoy wrote: The difficulty of having so many rules in your life is not that you can’t get things done; it’s that you find it h...

Response to a mom who expressed concern about the social outgoingness of a young teen: Consider the value of letting him be the star...

Nothing on paper is learning. Nothing recited is learning. Nothing in a conversation is learning.... Learning is putting inform...

Cara Potter wrote: Having the concepts of authenticity and freedom foremost in your mind doesn't help unschooling - they'...

Karen James wrote: Freedom is a lovely word. It’s a huge concept. It has a very meaningful place in our society. It is important to a...

Leah Rose wrote: Unschooling, deschooling, parenting peacefully, all of it called to me, deeply, but it felt like a huge risk, a gia...

Joyce Fetteroll wrote: It helped me think more clearly about unschooling when I realized unschooling isn’t something kids do. Unsc...

Rather than tell a child in advance what's about to be seen, it can be wonderful to let them feel they've discovered something on t...