Be curious about life

Get interested in things yourself. Not interested in your child getting educated, but in learning for yourself. Pursue an interest you've always wanted to but never had time for. Be curious about life around you. Look things up to satisfy your own curiosity. Or just ponder the wonder of it all. Ask questions you don't know the answers to. "Why are there beautiful colors beneath the green in leaves?" "Why did they build the bridge here rather than over there?" "Why is there suddenly more traffic on my road than there used to be?"

Let your child know that all the questions haven't been answered yet and it's not her job to just keep absorbing answers until she's got them all.

—Joyce Fetteroll

Five Steps to Unschooling
photo by Pushpa Ramachandran

Nearly natural limits

Kelly Lovejoy wrote:

The world is FULL of natural limits. Our lives are FULL of natural limits. It's the way we deal with those limits that matters. Finding solutions and dealing with obstacles and knowing what limits are real.

—Kelly Lovejoy

From a discussion of Boundaries, at Unschooling Basics
photo by Ester Siroky

A little peace

It doesn't take much to create a little peace, and then some more.

SandraDodd.com/peace/
photo by Ester Siroky

Priceless and profound

One of the greatest benefits of unschooling is the relationship with the child, and the changing attitudes of those in the family toward learning and being. Being a parent one is proud to be is priceless and profound.

The healing of one's own childhood wounds and the recovery from school are like little bonus miracles.

How Robbie saw unschooling in swans
photo by Nicole Kenyon
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Laughter helps

Deb Lewis wrote:

Unschoolers sometimes talk about having tools in their toolbox. No, unschoolers are not all plumbers. They're referring to a store of good ideas to shop around in to help in this business of living. I have one tool I use more than any other. A pipe wrench! No, it's humor.. . . .Laughter has helped my own family through hard times. Sure we would have come through the hard times anyway, but we came through them with less stress, fewer lasting scars, and lots of great one-liners.

—Deb Lewis

Unschooler's Pipe Wrench, by Deb Lewis
photo by Jo Isaac
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Visions and knowledge

I didn't know how much children could learn without reading, until I immersed myself in unschooling and my children's lives.

As their reading ability unfolded and grew, I learned things I never knew as a teacher, and that I wouldn't have learned as an unschooling mom had they happened to have read “early.” Reading isn't a prerequisite for learning. Maps can be read without knowing many words. Movies, music, museums and TV can fill a person with visions, knowledge, experiences and connections regardless of whether the person reads. Animals respond to people the same way whether the person can read or not. People can draw and paint whether they can read or not. Non-readers can recite poetry, act in plays, learn lyrics, rhyme, play with words, and talk about any topic in the world at length.

SandraDodd.com/unexpected
photo by Holly Dodd, from inside an auto-rickshaw

Music lives in the air

Music doesn't live in notes on paper, it lives in the air. People can be VERY musical without knowing how to read or write music, just as people can be very verbal, tell stories, be poetic and dramatic without reading and writing.

SandraDodd.com/music
photo by Sandra Dodd