Peaceful and engaging

Deb Files wrote, on facebook, and gave me permission to share:

The children are grown now and we all thank you for the inspiration and support that gave us confidence to follow a peaceful and engaging childhood for them. I used to say that I wouldn't know if we'd done things really well until they were grown. Now I know.

—Deb Files
(Martialia Deb Maling Files, on fb)

I love "peaceful and engaging," and appreciate the feedback.

Peace links
and
Strewing (for engagement links)
photo by Rosie Moon

"It's fun."

Sandra, in 2003:

I don't use the word "unschooling" except when I'm talking to homeschoolers.

When I'm talking to relatives or people at the grocery store or whatever, I say "We homeschool." Or more often, "Our kids don't go to school."

IF they seem interested, or if they make one of those canned-conversation responses like "Oh, that must be a lot of work," or "Oh, I could never to that," I just smile and say "It's fun. We mostly just have a lot of fun." or "We don't use a curriculum, we just learn from everything around us."

So within the inside of the inside of discussions with homeschoolers, I'm definitely an unschooler, but there's no advantage I've found in using that term with people who only want a one-minute "hi, how are ya? cute kid" conversation.

SandraDodd.com/school/say
photo by Roya Dedeaux

Learning not to teach

For years I have recommended that new unschoolers stop using the word "teach" and replace all statements and thoughts with phrases using the word "learn" instead. I've gotten much flak back from people saying it doesn't matter, or that's "just semantics." What started as a theory with me became belief and then conviction. Unschoolers who cling to the idea of teaching will handicap their own understanding of how learning works.

SandraDodd.com/teaching
photo by Annie Regan
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Reading odyssey

Though Holly wasn't reading, her vocabulary was sophisticated and she was fascinated by the history of and connectedness of words. When she did start to read, she had no reason to use easy books. She was still eleven when she did her first real reading, a Judy Blume novel. She read two of those, and moved on to Stephen King's novella The Body.

When she had only been reading a couple of months, we were sitting down to watch "The Twilight Zone,” Holly reached over to move the Tank Girl comic books she had been reading. One was called "The Odyssey." Then the DVD menu came up, and one of the episodes was "The Odyssey of Flight 33." She commented on it, and I said "You saw the word 'odyssey' twice in an hour? Cool!"

She said, "I saw the word 'odyssey' twice in one minute!"
. . . .Reading will happen, and if it takes longer for your children than you think it will, keep them happy and distracted in the meantime. As their experience and vocabulary grow, their reading will be that much more effortless the day they're fully equipped to understand the written word.

SandraDodd.com/r/threereaders
photo by Sandra Dodd (click it)
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Stomping around (in a good way)

Carol/sognokids wrote of recovering from snobishness about TV, concluding with:

We had cable reinstalled the next day, and we never looked back. We don't watch a lot of TV, but when we do, we do it together. We have laughed and cried together as we have watched, and we have wondered and marveled. Television has been a wonderful learning experience for me. It taught me to loosen up, and to appreciate those wonderful moments when I cocoon with my family. And when I watch my husband and son stomping around the house like Godzilla as they destroy Tokyo, I know that I am standing on holy ground.

—Carol/sognokids

The rest is worth reading, and there's a story by Deb Lewis, too:
SandraDodd.com/t/godzilla
photo borrowed from 60 Years of Godzilla
variant post:
High horse on holy ground

Looking more closely

Karen James wrote:

The best thing I did for my relationship with my son, which, consequently, added to his ease of learning naturally, was to look away from what all of my friends were doing, and look more closely at what my own son was inspired by.

—Karen James

That quote continues at: SandraDodd.com/readalittle
photo by Holly Dodd

Learning Patience

Karen James wrote:

When we are consistently patient with a child, in time the child will learn patience. The child will come to understand the relationship of patience to him/herself by experiencing and witnessing what patience feels and looks like. When we are consistently impatient with our children, we make it nearly impossible for the child to learn patience *from us*. They learn impatience. That's the relationship. We can't talk it into being something different. We can't will it into another form.

—Karen James

SandraDodd.com/patience
photo by Debra Heller Bures