Same for swans

Life has some inconvenient realities. Be happy anyway! Admire the beautiful birds, but watch your step.

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Reality as an environment for unschooling

Seeing and avoiding Negativity (and poop)

photo by Sandra Dodd, at Oakley Court, on the bank of the Thames, near Windsor

If you give a kid a camera...

Kes's mom wrote:

It’s the shadow of a piece of seaweed on a chalk stone. He took the photo because he spotted that it looks like a mermaid 🧜🏼‍♀️ (a steam punk mermaid perhaps). Taken at Holywell beach, Eastbourne.

Sandra says:

That's on the south end of England, halfway between Brighton and Hastings, for those whose map of England comes from history and literature. (← That was me, until I got to go and run around there some.)

The rock above the chalk mermaid is flint. There are medieval churches built of flint. It was mined, underground, by stone-age people.

Connections
photo by Kes Morgan-Davies

Flex your make-believe

Let children play, and build, and imagine. Encourage disguises and humor and moments of sweet escape. Welcome them back from their adventurous "journies" and elsewheres.

Be with your children, but don't expect their thoughts and emotions to always be with you.

Flex your make-believe.

Imagination, by Deb Lewis
photo by Elise Lauterbach
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Learning by being

If you touch your child gently, softly, lovingly, he is more likely to be gentle with others. He will have learned not from words, but from his own lived experience, from your example, how to touch gently.

more on touching gently
photo by Janine Davies

Helping casually

No one needs an assembly line to make a single item, nor to educate a single child. Rather than seeing the curriculum and then trying to wrap that around your child, or insert all the parts, it works better to see your child and help him learn as part of a busy life, considering occasionally whether maybe you should introduce other topics into his life, or introduce him to other people, places and things. This can be done casually, though, and doesn't need to be scheduled or methodical.

page 121 of The Big Book of Unschooling (page 110 in first edition)
photo by Chelsea Thurman
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Three little things

Today, three times, do something a little bit better.


Are you cutting an apple? Slow down and do something unexpected, something artsy. There might be an animal outside (or inside) you could offer the scraps to.

If you're asked to help someone, add a sweet gesture or a kinder word.

If you succeed and it helps, do it again tomorrow.

Uplift
photo by Amber Ivey
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Every bit of all the bits

Unschooling allows free use of any and all bits of information, not just school's small set. A grid based first on cartoon characters or the history of ice skating can be expanded just as well as one built on a second-grade version of the discovery of North America and the made-up characters in some beginning-reader series. If the goal is to know everything, and if each person's internal "universe" is unique, then the order in which the information is acquired isn't as important as the ease and joy with which it is absorbed.

The time will come in your unschooling when you will forget to use checklists, but it won't matter. The child's internal grid will already have given them the need to know what things feel, smell and taste, and what they used to be or will be, and whether it's different in other places. Connections will continue to be made throughout their lives. The universe inside will grow larger and the universe outside will become clearer with every new experience.

Disposable Checklists
photo by Cass Kotrba