With young children...

We sang a lot. Singing can happen while dressing and driving and making food, so I worked to produce multitaskers. 🙂
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We have chairs with posts on each side of the back (I don't know chair-part-terminology for it) and the kids would put sheets over them and then rubberbands or hairties to hold them there. When I was little my mom would put a sheet over a card table. We've put a little pop tent up inside. Sometimes you can get those very inexpensively, the two-person dome tents.. . . .
Museums and very young children: don't plan to see the whole thing. Go in for a while and leave when the kids are restless.
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We used to play "hide the music" with Kirby (when he was very young). We would wind up a little wooden music box and put it somewhere in his room and he would go in and find it by the sound. Interestingly, he would always look where it was the last time right away, without listening first.
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ICE in the bathtub. Freeze some in advance. We have a fish mold. The ice fish was good. (It was really for jello or casseroles). Rings, though, like in a bundt pan, for ice too, like they do for punch bowls. And you can freeze things into it. toys. Soap. But even regular ice cubes—they clean themselves up. They float. They bob up if you hold them down and then let go.


SandraDodd.com/youngchildren
photo by Sandra Dodd, of Adam Daniel and his new stuffed otter

Snakes and wild berries

When a science-minded kid loves to take the dog down by the river and look for wild berries and snakes, some parents say, "My kid just wants to play. He's not interested in learning. He'll never learn science just playing."

Each little experience, every idea, is helping your child build his internal model of the universe. He will not have the government-recommended blueprint for the internal model of the universe, which can look surprisingly like a school, and a political science class, a small flat map of the huge spherical world, a job with increasing vacations leading to retirement, and not a lot more.

SandraDodd.com/seeingit
photo by Sandra Dodd
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What can Be

If you hold on to all your old ideas and fears and images of learning, every bit of that builds a curtain of "what should be" and you can't relax, see and appreciate what is.

SandraDodd.com/gettingit
photo by Sandra Dodd,
and not a good photo,
of an elephant on the base of a cross
outside of Edinburgh castle
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"Just Add Darkness and Sleep"

Monday night I sat at my guest-room desk at the Daniels' home near London and thought I should check to make sure there was a post set to go out from this blog. Then I was too sleepy to remember, so I climbed into bed and slept a long, long time.

This morning on our way to the train station to go to London and do cool things, I told that story, and said I sent two posts on Monday, by accident, and was too sleepy to figure it out. Adam said "Just add darkness and sleep!"

That's a great idea sometimes, and it's what happened Monday evening here. Thanks, Adam, for the soothing thought.

SandraDodd.com/sleep
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Posture

In a response to the Always Learning discussion list, I wrote "The principles of unschooling and natural learning work the same regardless of a child's talents or abilities, but parental posture (emotional, behavioral postures) can keep unschooling from working well."

The other day during a discussion with half a dozen other unschoolers, some from France and some from England, I said that much of my writing was untranslatable because it had to do with English. This might be such an example.

The word "posture" is usually used to tell a child to sit up straighter or to stand more gracefully and impressively. But posture can be relative to something else—a wall, a chair, or another person. Posture can be very subtle, too. Posture can be biochemical. It's possible to read anger in another person's hands or the speed of his facial movements. It's possible to see love in the way a mother picks up or touches a baby. Or it's possible to see frustration, or resentment, or fear, in a parental reaction.

I don't think this will be easily translatable into any other language, but for unschooling to work, the relationship of the parent to the child needs to become so clean and clear that the parent is being, and not just acting. This might involve physical posture, but also thoughts and feelings, reactions and clarity.

It won't happen all at once, and it can only begin to happen when the parent understands that some postures are better, and others are harmful to a better relationship with the child.

SandraDodd.com/clarity
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a wifi modem set in the only window between the old part of a very old French farmhouse and the newer part. There were countless places where that modem would only have worked in one half of the house, but one perfect place where it could work throughout—an old window on the stairs between the top two floors.
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How many times can you say "no"?

Sometimes I've advised people to pretend they only have three hundred "no's"—they have a little ticket they have to spend every time they say no. And they better save some because some people use them up before the kid’s three.

What if your child grows up and you still have 150 tickets left that you can chuck in the trash? That’s pretty cool.

SandraDodd.com/yes
photo by Sandra Dodd

The quote is from a March 16, 2005 interview.
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Fascination

"The best thing you can do for your child is be fascinated by life. 🙂 Get rid of that cloak of dullness that school draped over everything. Relearn how to explore just for the sake of exploring not because it's good for you or because it will be on the test or because it could be good for you one day. Do what's fascinating right now."

—Joyce Fetteroll

"Products" of Education
photo by Sandra Dodd
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