The mystery of the moment

"What's in there?" Even before children can talk they wonder. They want to look in boxes, suitcses, open drawers, look into cabinets. Life is a mystery—a puzzle full of wonder with things inside other things, surprises in disguises.

When I was a kid, I was curious about buildings, houses, garages and sheds in my home town. I had a goal of going into every house. I tried to go into every business. Visiting friends, selling cookies, trick-or-treating and Christmas carolling got me peeks into private homes.

Some folks are curious about how machines work, or similarities in the skeletons of different birds. Some learn how guitars are built, or what makes a soufflé rise. Notice what your children wonder about. Help them explore the world. Nurture your own curiosity. You can't know what will happen, or what you will find, and some of it will be wonderful.

A mom named Amy left a comment on a Just Add Light and Stir post:

I had always wanted to learn to live in the moment, but it seemed a great mystery. Having my daughter and becoming an unschooler, I finally get it! . . . We are living together, happily, every day. What a nice way to be.

Amy's comment is here
photo by Sandra Dodd

The same and the safe

My favorite "new rule" has always been that learning comes first. Given choices between doing one thing or another, I try to go toward the thing that's newest for my kids, and most intriguing. "New and different" outranks "We do it all the time, same place same way." But there are comfort-activities, and to be rid of all of them would be as limiting as to only do routine, same, safe things. So we find a balance. Or we tweak the same and the safe, changing it enough to make it especially memorable from time to time.

SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Holly Dodd

Privacy and dignity

This regards the way I helped make peace between kids when they argued:

The reason I used the method of speaking to each child separately, and ME going back and forth, rather than summoning them to where I was is that I was trying to comfort them and help them be safe and to be better people—people they would be glad to be. They don't like it when they're all frustrated. If I can tweak sibling behavior and comfort the aggrieved child, and then go to the other one with comfort and ideas, each was better prepared, in private, without a witness knowing what he was "supposed to do" the next time. That was important to me, to give them some privacy and some dignity, and some time to think without other people looking at them or praising my suggestion, or criticizing them further.

SandraDodd.com/peace/fighting
There's more on the topic on Joyce's site: Siblings Fighting
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Learning is like a doorway

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Learning is defined not just as sucking in information about something the child is interested in. Learning is also figuring out the big picture and how things connect. Figuring out how stuff works, figuring out how people work, making connections, seeing patterns. This is a mechanical, biological process. It's how humans—all learning animals really—naturally learn, how kids are born learning.

Natural learning is like a doorway. We can't change the doorway but we can change the outside world so kids can more easily reach what intrigues them.

SandraDodd.com/joycefetteroll
photo by Sandra Dodd, in Pérouges, France

Their own world

Someone came to a discussion and assured us all that children under five were like scientists from an alien world. That sounds good at first, until you remember that they are natural parts of their own world. A sixty-year-old man is no more a human, no more a person, than a newborn baby.

SandraDodd.com/babies
photo by Trista Teeter

How to help

On helping other unschoolers: If we answer questions with "yes" and "no," and give people what they claim to want, or what they think they want, we are chucking fish out instead of providing information on how to fish, how to make one's own custom fishing equipment and when and where the fishing is great. Unschooling can't work as a series of yes/no questions.

SandraDodd.com/rulebound
photo by Sandra Dodd
It's a metaphor. Don't go fishing at the aquarium.

Seeing where a child *is*

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.

From a July 2011 post in a discussion on Always Learning
photo by Sandra Dodd