Monday, February 3, 2014

Bring it

child on a beach with a glass skyscraper behind
"It is our job as unschooling parents to help bring the world to our kids and our kids to the world. Unschooling is not 'whatever you want honey I'll be over here doing my own separate thing I'm sure you'll figure it out.' That would be neglect. We need to consistently be providing something better, richer, interesting, more vivid than they they would be getting in school. It's not up our kids to ask for enrichment. It is up to us to provide it."
—Sylvia Woodman

SandraDodd.com/nest
photo by Karen James
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Sunday, February 2, 2014

Happiness, excitement and enthusiasm

Joyce wrote:
"You can learn a lot by letting go of what you think you're seeing and really look."


"Don't fear your children's happiness, excitement and enthusiasm. Your kids are already experts on learning. You knew it all once too. But it's gotten buried beneath layers of "expert" ideas on how and what kids need to learn *in school*. You can learn a lot by letting go of what you think you're seeing and really look."
—Joyce Fetteroll


The quote was a light in a darker discussion.
Read more by Joyce here: http://joyfullyrejoycing.com
photo by Karen James
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Saturday, February 1, 2014

Flowing smoothly

medieval roof spout shaped like a lamb, seems, on an old church in France
Liquids flow, life flows, ideas flow, learning flows. Sometimes things don't flow smoothly, or don't flow freely, or flow where we don't want them to flow, or freeze up altogether. Parents can accept, acknowledge and appreciate flow, or they can block, knock and wreck it.

SandraDodd.com/flow
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Friday, January 31, 2014

Look for joy



Look for joy inside and outside of you.

SandraDodd.com/joy
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Thursday, January 30, 2014

Learning: sucked in, not pushed in


Weeding out terminology we would prefer not to mean improves thinking.
. . . .
Every time someone says "taught" or "teach" they can slip back into the whole school thing and be seeing the world through school-colored glasses. If they do what it takes, mentally and emotionally, to recast their reports and then their thoughts in terms of who *learned* something, then they can start to see the world in terms of learning.

The last holdout for some people is "he taught himself..." but maybe that should be the FIRST to go. Teaching comes from someone WITH skills or knowledge passing them on to those without them. If I taught myself to play guitar, I would have had to have known how first.
. . . .
I learned from everything around me, from trial and error, from watching others and asking questions.

The information was being sucked in by me, not pushed in by me or anyone else. I didn't PUT the information inside me, I drew it in.

SandraDodd.com/control
photo by Sandra Dodd, of bricks with Florida on the other side

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Generate joy

When you learn to give, it starts to flow, and the others around you are soft and giving and a family can generate a lot of joy!

sky and clouds reflected on a car

Focus, Hobbies, Obsessions, transcript of a chat
photo by Sandra Dodd, of the same clouds reflected twice
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Tuesday, January 28, 2014

How and why

People can only learn what connects to what they already know. The more one knows, the more one can learn. And THAT is how, and why, strewing works.



SandraDodd.com/connections
photo by Julie D
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