Look and see

If you're traveling or if you're in a familiar place, the things you see are viewed though your own windows, or doors. You see through your own eyes, and experience. *You* see.

The world you see where you are today will not be what you could see ten years ago, or twenty.

What your child sees and what you see will probably be different, and continue to change.

Keep looking.

SandraDodd.com/awareness
photo by Ester Siroky

Safe, respectful and empowering

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Unschooling is the opposite of both authoritarian and hands-off parenting. It's neither about creating rules to remote parent nor about letting kids jump off cliffs. It's about being more involved in kids lives. It's about accompanying them as they explore, helping them find safe, respectful and empowering ways to tackle what intrigues them.

—Joyce Fetteroll
2009

SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Sandra Dodd

Full, curious, free life

So what is unschooling? It's learning by living life. It's living a full, curious, free life with parents who support, encourage and help their kids pursue what interests them (while making opportunities available to expand their interests).

Unschooled children learn as a side effect of doing.

—Joyce Fetteroll

JoyfullyRejoycing.com/first-questions
photo by Diana Jenner
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See everything

When parents see how and what their children are actually learning instead of just scanning for the half dozen school-things, unschooling will make sense to the parents. If you wait for school to congeal from a busy life, you'll keep being disappointed. If you learn to see everything instead of just school things, unschooling will start working for you. When you see it you will believe it.

SandraDodd.com/seeingit
photo by Ester Siroky

Learning is learning

Learning is learning whether or not it's planned or recorded or officially on the menu. Calories are calories whether or not the eating is planned or recorded or officially on the menu.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/unschool/moredefinitions
photo by Robin Bentley, of exotic German... (not French fries, but something)
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Learning effortlessly

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

School is to unschooling as foreign language class is to learning to talk. The first is orderly, thorough, hard and hardly works. The second is chaotic, random, effortless and works like a charm."

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/definitions
photo by Sandra Dodd

To begin with...

Until a person stops doing the things that keep unschooling from working, unschooling can't begin to work.

SandraDodd.com/doit
photo by Sylvia Toyama