Unschooling is living and seeing

Unschooling is living a rich life and letting learning drop into your lap and into your ears and mind while you laugh and listen to music and play games. Unschooling is seeing the magic in every day, and the joy in yourself and the people around you.

That's some 20th century writing, here:
Unschooling and other Marvels, by Sandra Dodd
photo by Caroline Lieber
___

Attentively, solidly, and well

DO IT. Do it attentively, solidly, and do it well. THEN you can relax. If you relax at the beginning and don't really become an unschooling parents of a thriving unschooling child, it can amount to confusion, frustration and neglect.

SandraDodd.com/doit
art by Robert and Robbie Prieto; photo by some Prieto or another

Favorite things

My Favorite things about Unschooling You can do it at home! Your kids are there! It makes all of life a peaceful learning lab.

from a webpage older than SandraDodd.com
photo by Elise Lauterbach

Finding patterns

Look up. Trees? Clouds? Arches or ceiling joists? Textured ceiling?

Look down. Snow? Sand? Grass? Dirt? Concrete, tile or wood? Water, maybe, or carpet. (Both at once would be bad.)

Pretend to see your thoughts. Slow? Calm? Racing? Repetitive?

Different days are different ways. In a moment, it might be different. Find good patterns.

Patterns and Connections
photo by Sandra Dodd
__

Smiling about Smiling

Find something to smile about.

Beginners, aim for once per day—one extra smile.

More experienced unschoolers, raise that to several a day, and then once per hour.

Before long, you'll be smiling easily and more often than you could count.

You'll know you're significantly happier when just the thought of counting smiles will make you smile.

Sparkly Unschooling
photo by Karen James
__

In their own natural ways

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

It is natural for people to learn—each in their own way. It is natural for children to want to understand the world around them. They also want to join the adult world and become competent and capable adults themselves. They'll strive for this in their own natural ways. Unschooling parents work on creating a home environment that supports their children's natural desire to learn and grow.

Each child is unique and experiences the world in a different way than any other person and expresses themselves in ways that are different from every other person.

—Pam Sorooshian

I LIVE THEREFORE I LEARN: Living an Unschooling Life
photo by Colleen Prieto
___

Models and miniatures

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, there is a chapel. It once belonged to a Catholic girls' school. It was built as a half model of another chapel in France, but after it was being built, they realized a half-sized stairway wouldn't work. Mystery and adventure ensued.

There is much history, physics, artistry and varied purposes in such things.

Toy soldiers were quite the rage in England at one time. That led to kids who knew military tactics as well as some kids know their favorite video games now. That led to lead, though—lead based paints on lead figurines, and there's some biochemistry involved that they didn't know about yet in those days. (Some were tin, and now they're other metals, or plastic.)

Follow those trails, and things you didn't know were even out there will connect to things that are already in your own knowledge and experience. Connections
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a detailed miniature carousel

---

If you click the image above, you can see my other photos from my visit to Hollycombe Steam Collection, on their music box day, in 2013. There were collectors of mechanical music devices, and of miniature fair rides.

This is a first run of a trick Vlad Gurdiga has arranged for my site to do—a tool for using folders as slide shows. Vlad's pretty great. For me, the photos loaded quickly on my MacBook, semi-quickly on an iPad, and a subset of them loaded, after a while, on my iPhone.

The first photos are pub lunch in Liphook, animals on the property near the car park, some of Hollycombe's collection of wagons that travelling-fair workers used to live in, and of various things inside the park.