How can you tell?

How can unschooling parents tell if their kids are learning?

They can tell because they're there with them every day. How did you know when your child could ride a bike? How did you know when they could swim? That's how you know when a child can read or count by fives or spell. They do it!

When they discuss current events with an understanding of geography and history, you know they've picked up that information, gradually and from all kinds of sources. It won't be in the same order kids at school or using a curriculum might learn it, but one reason that schooled kids can fail to learn something is that they have nothing to hook the new fact to. With natural learning, all learning is hooked into something the learner already knows.

SandraDodd.com/interviews/successful
photo by Sandra Dodd

Possibilities and Joys

To a mom finding it difficult to be present with her child, and to get him to leave when it was time to go:


Nobody's still and at kid-speed all the time. But if you can figure out how to do it sometimes, then you can choose to do it, or choose to go faster, but to bring him along in a happy way.

Instead of saying "Come on, let's go!" maybe you could have picked him up and twirled him around and said something sweet and by the time he knows it he's fifty yards from there, but happy to be with his happy mom.

SandraDodd.com/parentingpeacefully
photo by Sandra Dodd

Stop the cycle now (if applicable)

It's not a quote, but it's a summary/paraphrase by Brie Jontry of part of a talk I gave in 2010. I was really amused by it. There's nothing I didn't mean, though I don't think I phrased it quite this succinctly that night. 🙂


STOP the cycle of shitty parenting NOW.

Give your child(ren) the childhood you would have wanted.

Be the dad you wish you'd had.

Dads, unschooling, issues (a new page inspired by that "quote")
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Slowing down

When I had one baby Kirby, I tried to consciously slow myself down and go at his speed when we went on walks, or when he examined something he had never seen. It wasn't easy. I kept working at it and was more patient when Marty and Holly came along.

It was good practice for unschooling; I didn't know it at the time, though.

Mindful Parenting
photo by Sandra Dodd, but Johanna Smith's camera caught a better version
We were up hill from it, using zooms. It was beautiful.

Love, love, love

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Parents do all kinds of things in the name of love….not all good for their children.

Love is not enough.

But there is a kind of love that is absolutely necessary for successful unschooling, and that is love of learning.

Unschoolers value learning. We look for it everywhere. We crave it.

But, love it gently. Don’t try to force it – not a good idea for learning OR love!

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/pamsorooshian
photo by Sandra Dodd

Threes

I had a Shakespeare professor who said "Three trees make a row," to confirm a pattern when a student noticed that something had appeared three times. I remember thinking, but not saying, "Not if they're making a triangle." But it wasn't a math class, and I understood his point.

There's something strong and fun about three. Two parents and a baby. A tripod for a camera or a telescope. A three-legged stool (a tripod to sit on). Three versions of a song. A book or movie trilogy. Counting by threes with its elegant stops at 33, 66, and 99.

photo by Sandra Dodd
Some other images in this blog with three of something:

What do you hope for?

Museum of everything

Destinations

Happy and glad

Calm and quiet

Leeway and freedom

Without TV...

Joyce Fetteroll, a few years ago, when her daughter was in her mid-teens:

My daughter and I have done a great deal of interacting as a direct result of TV. It's tied into her other interests in story telling. Without TV she wouldn't have the huge collection of comics she's written. Without TV we wouldn't have discovered manga. Without TV we wouldn't being going to Anime conventions together (I even dress up). —Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/logic
photo by Sandra Dodd