Flex your make-believe

Let children play, and build, and imagine. Encourage disguises and humor and moments of sweet escape. Welcome them back from their adventurous "journies" and elsewheres.

Be with your children, but don't expect their thoughts and emotions to always be with you.

Flex your make-believe.

Imagination, by Deb Lewis
photo by Elise Lauterbach
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Learning by being

If you touch your child gently, softly, lovingly, he is more likely to be gentle with others. He will have learned not from words, but from his own lived experience, from your example, how to touch gently.

more on touching gently
photo by Janine Davies

Helping casually

No one needs an assembly line to make a single item, nor to educate a single child. Rather than seeing the curriculum and then trying to wrap that around your child, or insert all the parts, it works better to see your child and help him learn as part of a busy life, considering occasionally whether maybe you should introduce other topics into his life, or introduce him to other people, places and things. This can be done casually, though, and doesn't need to be scheduled or methodical.

page 121 of The Big Book of Unschooling (page 110 in first edition)
photo by Chelsea Thurman
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Three little things

Today, three times, do something a little bit better.


Are you cutting an apple? Slow down and do something unexpected, something artsy. There might be an animal outside (or inside) you could offer the scraps to.

If you're asked to help someone, add a sweet gesture or a kinder word.

If you succeed and it helps, do it again tomorrow.

Uplift
photo by Amber Ivey
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Every bit of all the bits

Unschooling allows free use of any and all bits of information, not just school's small set. A grid based first on cartoon characters or the history of ice skating can be expanded just as well as one built on a second-grade version of the discovery of North America and the made-up characters in some beginning-reader series. If the goal is to know everything, and if each person's internal "universe" is unique, then the order in which the information is acquired isn't as important as the ease and joy with which it is absorbed.

The time will come in your unschooling when you will forget to use checklists, but it won't matter. The child's internal grid will already have given them the need to know what things feel, smell and taste, and what they used to be or will be, and whether it's different in other places. Connections will continue to be made throughout their lives. The universe inside will grow larger and the universe outside will become clearer with every new experience.

Disposable Checklists
photo by Cass Kotrba

Peace, joy and learning

It’s not so simple and straightforward as any one educational or parenting or political theory would like people to believe. But still, no matter what else the parents believe or deny, the tone and mood they set make a difference, for good or ill. . . . .
It will come back to peace, joy, learning, and parenting as directly and as sweetly as possible.

Natural patterns
The quotes are lifted out of context from SandraDodd.com/nature.
photo by Gail Higgins, in the southeastern U.S.
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Springtime (southern hemisphere)

The internet makes the big world small. We can see new photos from a future day or an opposite season.

The internet allows unschoolers to get ideas from others on other continents.

Bigger, friendlier world
photo by Jo Isaac, in south east Australia