Creation (by accident)

You can create more resentment by trying to prevent all resentment.

SandraDodd.com/resentment
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Priorities

Parents who make meeting their children's needs a higher priority will find that life is good and they, often unexpectedly, find that they are, themselves, less needy when they feel like really good parents.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/priorities
photo by Sandra Dodd

More efficient tools

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

The basic idea of unschooling is that we learn what we need by using it. And that's exactly how kids learn to speak English. Toddlers aren't trying to learn English. They're using a tool (English) to get what they want: which might be juice or a hug or picked up to see better. The English tool is more efficient than other tools they've been using: pointing or crying or wishing. And because English is more efficient, they use it more. And because they use it more, the get better at it. Kids learn English (and everything else) as a *side effect* of living and pursuing what they enjoy.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/english
photo by Sandra Dodd

Stop

Stop thinking schoolishly. Stop acting teacherishly. Stop talking about learning as though it’s separate from life.

SandraDodd.com/deschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd, of an interesting assortment of chimneys in Linlithgow
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Fascinating or non-fascinating?

In a discussion on why children should learn things, I suggested that it would make them more interesting at cocktail parties. Someone objected, saying children shouldn’t be pushed to learn things just to make them interesting. She had missed my point, but that only made the discussion more vibrant.


The cocktail party goal might be more worthy than pushing them to learn things so that they can get into college, but I was really enjoying the discussion because it was so different. For one thing, it’s quite a figure of speech now, so many years after the heyday of “cocktail parties." And wouldn't an admissions officer prefer fascinating over non-fascinating? But the stated objection was this: “To push kids in all kinds of directions in order for them to be fluent at cocktail parties is a waste of time, imho." It amused me and I responded. ...

SandraDodd.com/connections/cocktail
photo by Holly Dodd, of herself in a Learn Nothing Day shirt
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With young children...

We sang a lot. Singing can happen while dressing and driving and making food, so I worked to produce multitaskers. 🙂
. . . .
We have chairs with posts on each side of the back (I don't know chair-part-terminology for it) and the kids would put sheets over them and then rubberbands or hairties to hold them there. When I was little my mom would put a sheet over a card table. We've put a little pop tent up inside. Sometimes you can get those very inexpensively, the two-person dome tents.. . . .
Museums and very young children: don't plan to see the whole thing. Go in for a while and leave when the kids are restless.
. . . .
We used to play "hide the music" with Kirby (when he was very young). We would wind up a little wooden music box and put it somewhere in his room and he would go in and find it by the sound. Interestingly, he would always look where it was the last time right away, without listening first.
. . . .
ICE in the bathtub. Freeze some in advance. We have a fish mold. The ice fish was good. (It was really for jello or casseroles). Rings, though, like in a bundt pan, for ice too, like they do for punch bowls. And you can freeze things into it. toys. Soap. But even regular ice cubes—they clean themselves up. They float. They bob up if you hold them down and then let go.


SandraDodd.com/youngchildren
photo by Sandra Dodd, of Adam Daniel and his new stuffed otter

Snakes and wild berries

When a science-minded kid loves to take the dog down by the river and look for wild berries and snakes, some parents say, "My kid just wants to play. He's not interested in learning. He'll never learn science just playing."

Each little experience, every idea, is helping your child build his internal model of the universe. He will not have the government-recommended blueprint for the internal model of the universe, which can look surprisingly like a school, and a political science class, a small flat map of the huge spherical world, a job with increasing vacations leading to retirement, and not a lot more.

SandraDodd.com/seeingit
photo by Sandra Dodd
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