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

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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.

2500 posts

Thank you for reading Just Add Light and Stir! If you receive this by e-mail, or see it on facebook or on my website somewhere, please do click through to the blog where it lives.

If you usually see this on a phone, occasionally go in with an iPad/tablet or computer, and click through to some of the older posts while you're there. Phones don't show it nicely. There are 2500 pieces of art there (word and photo combos), carefully formatted, with links to related posts. Use this resource happily and well, and may unschooling continue to blossom and flourish in your life.

Thank you for recent assistance, those who sent gifts.
(there's a great list of milestone numbers there)

For one moment, or ten...

This post is from April 2013. It was called "Happy Monkey," the first time. It's a good time for a re-run.

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I went to the grocery store alone. It was crowded and people were moving fast, but were calm and smiling. I saw three young children. Their relatives were being very sweet to all of them. In other families, older kids were being helpful.

On the way to my van, a man who was 35 or 40 was happily riding the back of his shopping cart down the hill toward his car, with the wind blowing his hair.

On the way home, I thought of the cutest thing I had heard. A young mom had been holding a toddler, and he said something and touched her mouth. She said, "Monkey?"

He indicated that she was right.

"You're a monkey?"

"Happy," he said.

"You're a happy monkey? Happy monkey!"

And he was. He was very happy.

So easily, we can tip two degrees over into the sorrows and fears of the world. Without trying, we can fall into a pool of despair and take our friends and families down with us.

Not everyone can be happy today, but if your child is whole and well, for one moment or for ten do your part to help him be as happy a monkey as he can be.

SandraDodd.com/gratitude/health
photo by Julie D
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Clearly and maturely

Rippy D. wrote:

[The Always Learning discussion] has helped me think more clearly and maturely. It has helped me change unhelpful patterns and most of all helped me step into the *JOY* of life, connection, partnership with my children and husband. I know how scary it is to feel examined, and I think some other readers interpret examination as meanness, like I once did. I think to do unschooling well, it is a fundamental element to have an examined life. To be mindful of our choices and understand our thought processes.

—Rippy Dusseldorp

Healing Presence
photo by Ester Siroky
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Give them hope

Probably [doubters and critics] are sincerely concerned for your children, so try to be grateful for that, or at least to understand it.
. . . .
The nicest thing to say might be "Thanks, I'll think about it." If they say he might need some type of school, you could say yeah, someday he might. I liked to tell people that things were going well, but if that changed we would do something different. That gave them hope, and that was good for all of us. And it was true.


What Can I Say to Doubters and Critics?
photo by Cátia Maciel

Too much noise

I woke up with voices in my head, but it was my own voice. Too many words. "What if...?" and "How will...?"

The peace and safety of my children, even though they're young adults, was running through my mind, and what could go wrong, and what if one of them makes a bad decision, or an awkward mistake, or forgets to do something, or...

Then I remembered what I was doing at their age, each of them. Most of it ended up needing to be undone, or recovered from. But I remember, and those things informed my decisions ever after.


An agitated mom won't help any of us. And the agitation didn't show. It was nothing but thoughts racing and tumbling, tighter-than-necessary muscles, so early in the morning.

I made moves to calm myself, and to take several small positive steps. Breathe. Put clean cutlery away. Fill the birdfeeders. Feed the cat. Check on Holly, who isn't feeling well and was muttering in her bed.

And I began to think of things to be grateful for this morning. My children are alive and healthy. They are thoughtful and energetic. We have seed to give birds, and food for our cats. Holly has a good pillow and warm covers. She will feel better.

I can breathe and be still and not be knocked down by thoughts. Thoughts can lift me up. I can turn down the volume. I can switch channels.

SandraDodd.com/gratitude
photo by Sandra Dodd

The photo is a link to something written when I had three teens.
They were 21, 24 and 26 on February 7, 2013, when I was worried in the morning.
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Consider your legacy

How one decides to act toward, be with, think about and respond to children happens inside a person with a history, a person who had a childhood. Will childhood hurt be passed on to new children? Sad childhood memories can be seen as the things not to do, and healing can flow, but that can't be forced by anyone else. If it's not part of the thoughts and decision making of each parent, it won't work as well as it could.

SandraDodd.com/issues

Quote is from Family harmony and unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Happy Momentum

Jenny Cyphers wrote:

One of the very important aspects of unschooling that is solely on the parents, is to create a happy learning environment. Kids don't learn nearly as well when they aren't happy. It doesn't mean that every person needs to be happy at every moment of every day, it means that things that create happy momentum should be paramount from day to day.

If going to concerts with friends is something that creates happiness, do more of that. If staying at home without friends creates unhappiness, do less of that. If you want to unschool well, make your lives as happy as possible, make home a happy place, make food and grocery shopping and everything in between something that is happy.

Jenny Cyphers
photo by Holly Dodd, of a "shrinky-dink"
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Better moments, days, and weeks

"Each and every moment is new. You can just try to make the very best choice in the next moment with your child. As the moments get better, so do the days and weeks. So all you need to do is make this moment the very best it can be. That's all." —Ren Allen

The quote was provided by Eva Witzel. It goes well with SandraDodd.com/change.html
photo by Charles Lagacé

Bully-proofing?

QUESTION:

I worry that if our child does not go to school that he will be vulnerable to bullying when interacting with school kids at activity clubs like soccer or scouts.

RESPONSE:

School kids are vulnerable to bullying both at activity clubs and at school. The idea that practice with being bullied helps people to avoid bullying doesn't seem true. Do abused women stand up to abusers better than women who have not been abused?

With my kids, their tolerance for nonsense from other children was very low, and because they never had to be in a class or club, but it was always their option to leave, it made a huge difference. They knew they could stay if they wanted, or go home if they would rather.

Much of bullying happens because humans need a hierarchy to interact. They don't behave well in "equal" groups of equally inexperienced people their own age. First, they need to learn from older and more experienced people. And if they have no leaders or experts in the group, then bullying and gangs can develop, because people seem to have a need to know their "rank" in a group.

I think bullying is a natural side effect of people feeling powerless, and of not being in the regular world where people do have different ages and different levels of experience in a situation.

SandraDodd.com/musicroom
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Your own clear understanding

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Unschooling happily and successfully requires clear thinking. I don't think it works as well when people just look at those with young adult kids who are happy and successful and try to copy them without doing the hard thinking and building their own clear understanding of unschooling. When they try to emulate, they are still following rules - unschooling rules. Unschoolers always say yes to everything. Unschoolers never make their kids do anything. Kids always decide everything for themselves. And so on. But those "rules" are not unschooling. Unschooling well requires understanding the underlying philosophy of how children learn, and the principles that guide us in our everyday lives arise from that philosophy. It isn't some new kind of parenting technique that can be observed and applied without understanding.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/understanding
photo by Belinda Dutch
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the developing souls and minds of children

I think if people divide their lives into academic and non-academic, they're not radical unschoolers. I think unschooling in the context of a traditional set of rules and parental requirements and expectations will work better than structured school-at-home, but I don't think it will work as well for the developing souls and minds of the children involved. And those who are not radical unschoolers would look at that and say "What do their souls have to do with unschooling?"

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If you wish this post had been longer and you want to take a five-minute detour, there is a song by Tracy Chapman called "All that You Have is Your Soul" (or you could listen to Emmylou Harris sing it).

SandraDodd.com/unschool/radical
photo by Sandra Dodd

Flow, sparkle, joy

Unschooling should be better than school; if it's not, the kids would be better off in school. Any unschooler who wants to do just the bare minimum of what she "has to do" to be considered (by whom!?) an unschooler is NOT unschooling well or right. It needs energy, activity, interactivity, flow, sparkle, joy.

other "better than school" posts and sparkling ideas
(quote from 2014, preserved here]
photo by Nina Haley

The other things flow in around it.

(Below is most of my response to a complicated question about the balance of power and relationships, citing Bruno Bettelheim about A.S. Neill, and the assumption that unschoolers were libertarians:)

I've unschooled for over twenty years, and am not a "libertarian," and the unschooling ideals I've aimed for involved learning. They had little to do with Neill or Bettleheim (though I did like reading Bettleheim on fairy tales), but had to do with John Holt, attachment parenting, and observation of other families doing similar things.

Being a child's partner rather than his adversary makes the balance of knowledge unimportant. Nowadays my children drive me around, help me out, read small print and get things off high shelves. For many years, I did those things for them.

SandraDodd.com/partners

SandraDodd.com/balance

Learning first, and partnership and being present close after, and all the other things flow in around it.

photo by Sandra Dodd, of a well dressing in the village of Tissington
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Kinder, gentler ways

If a parent knows that she wants to be kinder, gentler, more positive, more nurturing, there are things that she can do—little changes she can make and decisions she can make—that lead her toward that, and "follow your heart" is not a good one.


When people say "Well, I just followed my heart," sometimes that didn't go to a really good place because they didn't have a picture of their child's feelings. Coming up with a plan to logically step, step, step-by-step away from the dark confusion of people's childhood memories, hidden ideas, frustrations, fears—stepping away from that into the light is a better thing to do. And eventually they may get so good at this 'being more positive' that it seems like they're following their heart. But it needs to be their new, improved, mindful heart.

SandraDodd.com/interviews/extras
photo by Vlad Gurdiga
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Confident, mindful parents

Frank Smith said in his book Learning and Forgetting that to learn to do or be something, one should hang out with those who already had and valued that ability. So if you want to become a confident, mindful parent, hang out with confident, mindful parents. A conference is the perfect place to do that.

I have a collection of expressions of regret, from parents who stalled about really making a change in their parenting and homeschooling. It's "If only..." (SandraDodd.com/ifonly) They say, in various ways, "We should have made this change sooner."

Some people have said that they will go to a conference when their kids are older. It can happen that their kids end up in school because the parents couldn't figure out how to homeschool well on their own, and they gave up. Had they gone to a conference, they might still have their kids home today.

from "Little Tools for an Epic Life," by Sandra Dodd
photo by Sandra Dodd

Food and its purpose

[When my children were little...] I always put the kids' needs ahead of dinner. Dinner happened after or around nursing babies and such.

You might have to do away with the idea of a peaceful mealtime for a few years. Maybe re-thinking meals would be the way to go.

I think it helps rather than to live by the idealized traditional model of dinner at 6:00, all at their seats, dinner conversation that could be reported to the media as an ideal mix of news of the day and philosophy, etc, to think of food and its purpose. People need to be nourished physically and it's uncomfortable to go to sleep hungry. THAT is the purpose of evening food, not the appearance of a well-organized dinner.

SandraDodd.com/eating/dinner
photo by Sandra Dodd, of one of the former Dodd babies

Take a break (not yet; soon)

Here's a way to gauge your unschooling progress: Can you stop learning, at your house? Can you put the pause on unschooling?

Once a year, lots of people do that, as well as they can. Just one day. It's coming up next month, July 24.

I thought you might need some time to plan.


I used to own a full-sized poster of that art, but now it's in a better place—with an unschooling family in Utah.

Learn Nothing Day, in here, over the years

Is learning fun?

Kathryn Baptista wrote, in a discussion about formerly-schooled kids who assert that learning is not fun:

Playing games is fun. Watching tv is fun. Reading can be fun (if it's something you like and you're doing it for...well...fun.) Playing with (and maybe even taking care of) the dog is fun, pretending to be a pirate, making things, using the computer, maybe cooking... Fun.

You get the idea. And most people who are here, even the beginners, will recognize that for any and all of these things that kids choose to do for fun during the day can be a source of remarkable learning.

—Kathryn Baptista
2006

CONNECTIONS: How Learning Works
photo by Lourdes Garcia

The wondrous now

There are WONDROUS things people can do with current technology, and it's likely to get better and better, isn't it?

Don't separate your children from the future, from progress, and from understanding and using things just because the parents don't understand them or use them as well as they might. Don't hobble your child out of fear or superstition or trying to impress people you don't even know who want to scare and shame you. Be your child's partner. Lift him up and let him see.

SandraDodd.com/partners/child
photo by Sandra Dodd, of sculpture and shadows in Albuquerque,
to share around the world, without printing, paper or postage
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