Showing posts with label playground. Show all posts
Showing posts with label playground. Show all posts

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Glorious, serious fun

A skeptical mom asked:
Can you tell me how it can serve a child if they say spend hours a day watching Scooby-Doo ?
Deb Lewis responded:
I asked my son what he thought a person could get from watching cartoons. He said he's learned a lot from watching Loony Toons and especially Daffy Duck. "What?" I asked. "I learned that you really can solve all your problems with dynamite!" 🙂

Don't panic. He was being funny.

But really, maybe hours of Scooby Doo is glorious fun. Fun is serious. Fun is important, especially for kids. Don't underrate fun. People who are not happy as children seldom find easy or lasting happiness as adults.
—Deb Lewis

That and more, by Deb and by others:
SandraDodd.com/t/cartoons
photo by Sandra Dodd

Saturday, December 9, 2023

All-slightly-better Everything

Someone wrote that learning about unschooling felt like learning a new language.

I responded
It's like learning a new everything, but an all-slightly-better everything.

SandraDodd.com/beginning
photo by Renee Cabatic

Saturday, October 28, 2023

People learn by playing.

My kids were always the most exhausted not after a day of physical activity, but after a day of intense learning. If they saw things they had never seen, got to do something they’d never done, met new people and played and talked, they slept like rocks.

Sometimes the most intense learning of all looks like play. And that is central to what makes unschooling work.

What makes unschooling work is that children learn by playing. Older kids too. Adults, too.

People learn by playing.

Chat with Sandra Dodd on Mommy Chats, 4/25/07
photo by Janine Davies

Thursday, October 26, 2023

Choices and thought processes

"I think to do unschooling well, it is a fundamental element to have an examined life. To be mindful of our choices and understand our thought processes."
—Rippy Dusseldorp

SandraDodd.com/being/healing
photo by Sarah Scullin

Saturday, September 9, 2023

Accepting support

Paula wrote:

I WANTED to be a thoughtful, respectful parent.
....
I wanted to say yes as much as possible, and respect and enjoy my children for who they are, not who I thought they should be.
—Paula F.


There is more of how Paula got to that resolution, at "Support" can be a problem.

SandraDodd.com/support/thoughts
photo by Roya Dedeaux

Monday, May 15, 2023

It's ALL temporary

Below is part of a response by Robyn Coburn to a doubtful mom saying if ALL her kids wanted to do ALL day EVERY day was..., that she would have a problem. After creating some other all-day-interest examples, Robyn wrote:

The fact is that even if it is ALL they want to do for ALL day EVERY day, it will still be temporary; EVERY day would still not last forever. It would be a temporary need being fulfilled. Discovering and facilitating the children's passions is another tentpole of Unschooling practice. A child discovering something that they *want* every day is cause for celebration.

The only way to know if your children genuinely, truly want to do the other activities is if they have the option to choose not to do them. They can only choose to switch it off when they have the option to leave it on.
—Robyn Coburn

SandraDodd.com/choicerobyn
photo by Chris Chambliss

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Learning without clocks

School schedules give the illusion that life should be divided into 50-minute increments. It's nonsense.

Our culture has this "hour" and "half hour" thing that is as unnatural and arbitrary as can be. It has to do with clocks, not with people. It has to do with salaries and billing.

Be wary of scheduling and measuring, while deschooling.

SandraDodd.com/deschooling/
photo by Kinsey Norris

Friday, September 16, 2022

Easy learning

Everything counts, and every connection made increases the depth and breadth of the map of the universe each person is building. It makes it easier to learn the next few things, because there are more places to hook the knowledge.

SandraDodd.com/strew/how
photo by Sandra Dodd

Friday, August 12, 2022

Protect your little partner

Me, in a discussion of what was okay for a young child to mess up, in a public park, and how to explain it to him:

If you can't explain something to a four or five year old, just say no. Part of being partners, and being on the same team, is that what he does you're doing too. It's not okay for a mother and child to be doing something others don't want them to do (namely, the owners or managers of a place) and for the mom to shrug wide-eyed and point to the kid and say "He did it."

Gravel, rock and mulch play (on Always Learning)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Knowledge, concepts, humor

If you just play all the time, how will you know the kids are learning? I knew my boys had learned all the swimming safety rules when they rhythmically took turns reciting them exactly wrong: Never swim with a buddy, always swim alone; Always swim in a storm; Always run by the pool...

There was no reason for me to say, "That's wrong." I would have spoiled their fun if I had. I didn't say a word. I knew enough already, because I had this information:

  1. they knew all the rules
  2. they understood the concept of opposites
  3. they had a sense of humor and weren't afraid to use it.

SandraDodd.com/playing
Photo by Sandra Dodd, not my local pool,
but one in Surrey, in 2012.
I hope it's still there!

Thursday, June 9, 2022

Small changes


Each person knows when she's happier and when she wishes things were a little better. If small changes of attitude can make more happy moments than before, that benefits everyone involved.

SandraDodd.com/happy
photo by Roya Dedeaux

Thursday, April 7, 2022

Calmly confident


Stay at the playground. Play with sand and water. Find seeds. Sit in the shade, and in the sun. Set ice in the shade and in the sun. Write with ice on a sunny sidewalk. If there's a brass plaque at the park you can set a piece of ice on it when it's hot and get the letters in reverse, melted into the ice. Don't talk about WHY those things happen unless the kids ask. Just let it happen. They'll figure it out.

Once they get the hang of figuring those things out, they'll be able to figure out harder things. If they practice on cheap and easy stuff (ice is great—in the bathtub for floaty-toys, crushed ice for snacks...), they'll be calmly confident about figuring out increasingly harder things.

SandraDodd.com/substance
photo by Nina Haley

Thursday, January 27, 2022

Over and over and often

You don't need to control yourself to keep yourself from being controlling. 🙂

Make generous, kind choices, over and over, as often as you can.
greenslideNinaHaley
SandraDodd.com/battle
photo by Nina Haley

Saturday, January 8, 2022

What or where, and when?

Nancy Wooten wrote:

My husband wasn't too sure about unschooling at first, and was also adamant the kids be in bed and stay there at a certain time. I'd just come home from a one-day conference—probably the first time I heard Sandra speak—with an armload of interesting toys and books and a head full of inspiration. One of the books was about finding Titanic, and included a paper model, which I decided Mommy should put together (I really like that kind of thing 🙂).

I was working on it after the kids had gone to bed, but then-7-y.o. Alex got up. He looked at the book and we talked about it as I worked; we discovered what a fathom was, and that Titanic came to rest on the continental shelf, not the very bottom of the ocean, and I'm sure some more interesting things, but those stick in my mind.

About a half hour later, Alex went back to bed and I kept gluing. Dh came in and said, "So that's unschooling." He'd overheard the conversation. I said, "Yeah, that's unschooling." Never had an argument after that. 🙂

—Nancy Wooten
Stories of Late-night Learning
photo by Sarah Dickinson, of a seawater-flooded playground in Port Stewart, Northern Ireland. It's the closest photo I have to the right waters, and the Titanic was built in Belfast.

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Learning without effort

When unschooling is working really well, learning will be happening, for kids and parents, without effort.
The Fabric of Life
photo by Julie D
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Thursday, July 9, 2020

Helping relationships


Unschooling
can help relationships
in all kinds of ways.

Broken relationships
can harm unschooling
in all kinds of ways.

Benefits of Unschooling when the Teen Years Arrive
photo by Daniel Moyer Artisan
__ __

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Aiming the spotlight



Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

I once described the difference between teaching and learning as where you shine the spotlight. In teaching, the spotlight is on the teacher. There may or may not be a learner taking in what the teacher is doing.

With learning, the spotlight is on the learner. The source is unimportant. There might be a teacher. There might be a set of blocks. There might just be the learner's thoughts.

If that's called "teaching" then it pulls the spotlight away from the learner. The light shines on the source as if it were the actor in the process.

I think parents like to feel like a child's learning is their project. If the teacher isn't in the spotlight, then something they aren't in control of or directing is happening.

—Joyce Fetteroll


The photo is re-run from Clearer and larger
photo by Julie D.
__

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

It's about everything.


"I wish people who think unschooling is about doing nothing could know that it's about everything."
—Stephanie LaBarge
in an online chat in June, 2010


SandraDodd.com/connections/
photo by Sarah Lawson

Monday, May 13, 2019

Adventure!


The smaller the child, the bigger the small adventures seem.

When the world is new, adventure is all around.

SandraDodd.com/physicality/
photo by Roya Dedeaux
__

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Like night and day

A rule that noise is okay at a park isn't as good as looking at the principles. Even in a park, time and place can be factors.

We met in a park with other families for years. Morning before lunch. LOTS of noise, sometimes staying longer, eating running, singing, rough-with-sand (if there weren't younger kids or kids who weren't with our group).



Keith and I also took our kids to parks after dark a few times, and swung them on swings to calm them down, and to have some fun in a cooler, quieter place after some big activity or other, or just for the fun of cold slides instead of the hot slides Albuquerque kids are used to. But we were helping them be quiet, snd screaming wouldn't have been good, in a residential neighborhood after dark. Yes, legally the park is open until 10:00 p.m. but "legal" isn't the only consideration.

Text (rearranged a bit) from SandraDodd.com/principles
photo by Kirby Dodd