the homeschooler post

There's a great episode from The Ellen Show in which a three-year-old girl dances on stage with her mom. You can't help but smile when you watch her. She moves with pure abandon, joy, and confidence. During the interview portion of the show, Ellen asks the little girl, "So you think you want to be a dancer when you grow up?" and the little girl replies, "I am a dancer!" We've probably all innocently asked this question of a child at one time or another. I know I have. It's one of those standard icebreakers we use when meeting a child for the first time or when trying to engage them in conversation. People's intentions are usually good when they ask about a child's future dreams. But the question itself can be problematic. Here's why: 5 Reasons NOT to Ask: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 1. It makes the assumption that children have to wait until they are adults in order to "become" something or someone. That they are not fully formed human beings capable of living, doing, and being in the present. For some children, it is a question loaded with pressure and assumptions and basically serves as a means of labeling and limiting a child at a very young age. And it teaches children to categorize others in this same way. 2. They don't know. The first time they are asked, many children will shrug their shoulders and say, "I don't know," because it's the truth. Children naturally want to please, so as they get older they often give an expected answer, such as fireman, doctor, scientist, policeman, lawyer, or some other occupation that adults and/or the media have shown them is valued by society and will garner them praise. 3. Because they get asked this question frequently. Children quickly come to realize that it isn't a sincere invitation to talk about themselves honestly. Over the years, they may conform to societal, educational, or parental pressure and pursue what's expected of them. Their answer may become so rehearsed and ingrained that they begin to believe the script. Worst of all, they may feel shame or even fear if and when they realize that the "thing" they told everyone they wanted to become just isn't who they really are. 4. It sends an early message that we must choose one thing in life. One path, one goal, and march faithfully and diligently toward it. But what about those of us who may be "multipotentialites" (explained by Emilie Wapnick in her insightful Ted Talk ), or people who don't have one true calling, but are good at and nourished by several talents or passions?Children who are naturally interested in a variety of things should be encouraged to explore and choose without limits, just as those who excel at one thing - be it dancing, singing, gardening, cooking, dinosaurs, constellations or car engines - should be taken seriously in their pursuits. 5. All children deserve to be valued for who they are now. Not for who we may want them to become. They deserve to be recognized for their contributions and accomplishments in the present, not for what we may expect them to do in the future. They deserve to be listened to and heard. And they deserve to know that whatever they choose to do in life, they will be supported, loved, and respected. Maybe a better question to ask children is something as simple as "What makes you happy?" Come to think of it, it's a question we should also be asking each other as adults. Ellen Rowland is an American living in Senegal, West Africa in an off-the-grid earth house she helped build with her husband and two homeschooled children. She writes about culture, family, things that are good for the planet and life without school. A lover of all things edible, she can usually be found in the kitchen when she’s not writing or creatively encouraging her children’s passions. She blogs about parenting and unschooling at ​A Muddy Life .

Withdrawing your child mid-year for CA homeschooling? Get legal tips & sample letters for a smooth transition. Contact HSC for support.

When I was actively parenting my two grown children, I must have said “everybody’s different” at least 300 times. I remember a lot of eye rolling after I said it, but I kept saying it anyway. It must have sunk in eventually because both kids grew into adults who passionately believe in and advocate for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) values. I didn’t homeschool them, but I’m confident I would have been a homeschool mom if the times had been different. The recognition of and need to provide an inclusive environment where all children’s voices are heard wasn’t nearly as recognized and dire as it is today. I do remember there was a boy in my young son’s class named Sam who always wore a clown nose to school, rarely spoke, sat alone, and could recite the capital of every state without blinking. My son routinely announced at the dinner table that Sam wore a different colored clown nose to school that day. Or that his classmates made Sam cry that day because Sam didn’t know how to play kickball. After my son made his announcement, my ex would inevitably say something insensitive like: “I wouldn’t play with Sam anymore. He sounds like an oddball.” I always countered with my worn-out mantra: “Everybody’s different.” Cue the eye rolls and cries of “moooooommmm” – happened every time. This routine played out night after night after night until it grew into an ongoing family rift. Fast forward 20 years. I saw Sam on Facebook recently. He’s now a chess grandmaster and a confident, handsome young man. His parents must have recognized his gifts and supported and encouraged him into a successful adulthood. I have no doubt if homeschooling had been more mainstream at the time, they would have homeschooled Sam. They must have been so heartbroken when Sam came home from school every day and confided in them about what he endured. I’m guessing it was my memory of Sam (and every kid like him) that motivated me to start my company. Maybe I wanted to help parents teach their kids that “everybody’s different” without having to say it 300 times and tolerate 300 eye rolls. Or maybe I wanted to help all the “Sams” of the world get through their day without getting emotionally pummeled by classmates. Who knows? Whatever the reason, it was situations like these that pushed me into my current career. I know I can’t help every parent in the world teach their child how to be compassionate to people who are different. But if I can help some of them raise inclusive, kind-hearted humans who embrace DEI values, that’s enough for me. Trish Allison is a career writer, mom of two grown children, and the founder of DEI for Parents . The goal of DEI for Parents is to help parents raise equality-minded kids by incorporating diversity and inclusion values into daily home life.

What is community? How do you present yourself to your community? What do you offer and what do you expect in return? As humans, one of our superpowers is the ability to create connections and communication – building communities. One definition of community is “a feeling of fellowship with others as a result of common goals.” Your group, your circle, your band, your people who you resonate with. In the past our communities were comprised of whoever we lived by. The common circumstances of place and time were what banded us together, but in this day and age we get to choose our communities to a larger degree than ever before. This, sometimes worrying, amount of choices allow us to take our communities for granted. We could so easily find a new one that we may be half hearted in our attempts to build up and sustain the communities we are in. We may hesitate to invest because we are wondering if we have chosen the right group. Perhaps we simply are unsure of how to support our communities. Our family has been thinking and talking about community recently. Building and encouraging community is something that we are all constantly practicing, and it has been nice to talk about what each of us see and do, and to learn from one another. We are trying to bring intention into our community building. We thought that sharing some of what we have noticed with the Homeschooler Post community might be of interest and use, and might help continue the constant process of building the communities we all want to live in. We look forward to ongoing feedback and thoughts on this subject from this new community! Building and engaging with a community is a very important aspect of homeschooling. Once established, our community can offer friendship, different perspectives, support, and much more. But how can we go about encouraging a community to form? How can we help to nurture it? And what actions might undermine our attempts? One action that we can all take to foster that fellowship is to engage. When members of a community actively look for opportunities for connections and ways to support each other, rather than passively hoping and waiting for these opportunities to arise, they lift the whole group beyond idol acquaintance and help to move it toward a network of friends who support each other. This can be hard and takes practice. We may need to remind ourselves often to look for ways that we can help those in our community. This means not simply asking how they are and expecting the standard responses that we all tend to give, but instead for each of us to delve a bit deeper and ask ourselves, is there something I can do? Can I offer to watch someone’s kids while they go to a meeting (or get a shower alone)? Can I bring food over when someone is sick? These gestures are not empty, and can be really meaningful even when they are declined. It also helps to reassure others that if they find themselves in a tough spot, there are people around who care and who they can go to ask for help. Think for a moment and make a mental list of how many people in your community you feel genuinely comfortable going to and asking for help. Be realistic in who you would ask, and who you are really confident would step up. How many people are on that list? What can we do to make each of our lists longer? One step may be to make sure that our own names appear on the list of the other members of our communities. Another quality that fosters community and that stems from actively looking for ways to help is be reliable. If one of us offers to help, and that offer is accepted, make sure we are dependable and will actually do the thing we offered or that was requested. In a busy life, look for ways to say “yes”. These are the two main strongholds of community that we have come up with time and again in discussions. Engage your friends in community to create fellowship. Know what they are doing in their lives and when they are struggling, check in, offer help, host play dates or share ideas. Be reliable, be the shoulder that is there to cry on, be the person who showed up with coffee on a rough morning, be present in your community with your time, your energy, your heart. Engage and be reliable. -Grace and Aaron Haiman are The Homeschooler Post's newest team of writers. Aaron brings his perspective to homeschooling as a life long unschooler. Together the Haiman Family is continuing their journey while homeschooling their daughter.

John Holt was a school teacher and author who became an advocate for school reform in the 1960, and when he no longer felt schools could be reformed, an advocate for homeschooling. He wrote 10 books on education and established Growing Without Schooling magazine in 1977, which was published until 2001. His clear and analytical ideas inspired a few bold parents to reject schools in favor of a life full of learning for their children. “Real learning is a process of discovery, and if we want it to happen, we must create the kinds of conditions in which discoveries are made. We know what these are. They include time, leisure, freedom, and lack of pressure.” ~ John Holt Though he had no children of his own, he worked and spent time with children and found them inspiring and interesting. He believed children had a passionate need to understand the world around them, which he called a biological drive to acquire information and knowledge and to make sense of the world. He had strong ideas, supported by research and observation, about what helped and what harmed learning. In all of his work, Holt meticulously demonstrated how school pressure, coercion, and assessment got in the way of learning. Children failed in school, he said, because stress and fear, fear of being wrong or of disappointing adults, stunted learning, No one can really learn well when being forced to learn things that aren’t personally important. The system and the teachers worked against what children really needed in order to learn, and harmed children in the process. He felt that teachers often disliked children and contributed to their insecurity and fear. Holt also pointed out the benefits to learning if children have choices, peace, safety, when their self-esteem is intact and they have projects and interests of their own to pursue with the help of a loving adult. Relationship, Holt said, was crucial to learning. As Holt came to believe keeping children out of school was a good option, he encouraged parents not to make the same mistakes schools made. Holt knew the same damage from school could happen at home if parents were more interested in being teacher-like and playing school than they were in understanding and facilitating learning. In Learning All the Time, Holt wrote, “Learning, is not the product of teaching. Teaching does not make learning. As I mentioned before, organized education operates on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them. This is not true. It is very close to one hundred percent false.” Holt pointed out the benefits to learning if children have choices, peace, safety, when their self-esteem is intact and they have projects and interests of their own to pursue with the help of a loving adult. “Relationship,” Holt said, “was crucial to learning.” And he urged homeschooling parents not to replicate school at home and cautioned against the teacherly approach: “Not only is it the case that uninvited teaching does not make learning, but – and this was even harder for me to learn – for the most part such teaching prevents learning. Now that’s the real shocker. Ninety-nine percent of the time, teaching that has not been asked for will not result in learning, but will impede learning.” Holt’s writing is moving and provocative, but his work wasn’t just an appeal to emotion. He cared about good judgment and reason. He cared about clear thinking. He tried to help teachers and parents really understand learning, what would harm it, and what could make it grow and blossom. Holt knew that learning requires trust. Anything that hurts a relationship between a parent and child hurts learning, too. Judgment, criticism, and correction can inhibit a child and stifle learning. Again, in Learning All the Time, Holt describes learning to read as it must feel to a child, as a “dangerous adventure.” The potential for a child to fail, make mistakes, to become embarrassed or feel bad about himself means there must be sufficient comfort, security, and support in order for him to be successful. No one wants to start out on a potentially dangerous adventure with an impatient grump or critic. Though Holt started writing 50 years ago, his work is still relevant today. It has been the foundation of many happy and peaceful homeschools and the evolution of the modern unschooling philosophy. Parents who read and consider John Holt’s work may be able to side-step the problems of schooling and teaching and avoid school at home. And they may be better able to see their children as Holt saw children, eager explorers and thinkers, philosophers building a model of the universe. “Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. They learn much more from things, natural or made, that are real and significant in the world in their own right and not just made in order to help children learn; in other words, they are more interested in the objects and tools that we use in our regular lives than in almost any special learning materials made for them. We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions – if they have any – and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.” I have quoted here from Learning All the Time, Holt’s last book, published after his death. It was pieced together by his publisher from notes, letters, and articles Holt wrote and is a short 162 pages. It’s an easy introduction to the ideas of Holt for anyone looking for a place to start. Deb Lewis is the mom of grown up, always unschooled Dylan, and wife to David. She lives, works, plays and learns in Montana.

In the 1960s, Martin Seligman tested conditioned responses in dogs, giving them mild but inescapable electric shocks. Later, the dogs were moved to new enclosures in which they could escape shocks by simply stepping over low dividers onto non-electrified flooring. Seligman found, however, that many dogs did not step over. They just laid down on the electrified floor and continued to take the shocks. They had learned that nothing they did could prevent those shocks. They had learned to not even try to escape the shocks. In other words, they had learned helplessness. Seligman’s discovery of learned helplessness has been utilized in understanding children’s behavior in classrooms. Many school children are presented with lessons or tasks that they are not ready for and when these kids meet with repeated failure in the form of criticisms or low grades, they often give up. They learn that no matter how hard they try, they fail. Many kids decide that they will continue to fail in that context, and some kids generalize failing expecta­tions to other subjects or activities. What does all this classroom stuff have to do with homeschooling? Many parents take their kids out of school and begin to homeschool them precisely because their kids’ readiness, energy levels, or interests just didn’t align with the demands of the class­room. Unfortunately, learned helplessness may continue to affect kids’ academic progress at home. Learned Helplessness: How to Spot It In studies of the phenomenon, kids who performed equally well at a particular task were chal­lenged with an impossible problem. Of course, none of the kids could solve the problem. It was impossible! The kids were then given a task, one that was almost identical to the first. Some kids did as well or better than they had with the first problem; the unsolvable problem seemed to make them work harder. They displayed mastery orientation. They assume that they can indeed solve difficult problems or learn material, and they roll up their metaphorical sleeves and try harder. Other kids fared far worse with this task than they had with the original, almost identical, task. Their failure with the impossible task had apparently eroded their confidence and ability. If your child has little motivation to learn, if she displays sadness, anxiety, frustration, or anger when faced with a difficult lesson or task, she may have learned helplessness. Learned Helplessness: How to Overcome It Remember, learned helplessness is something a child has learned. Children develop their atti­tudes toward challenges by watching their parents, through criticism (especially criticism from parents and teachers), and from events (especially crises) in their lives. It’s not easy to change kids’ attitudes, but research suggests the following: Allow your child to control at least some aspects of education; especially, and as much as possible, the pacing of her work or learning. Be sure to watch your child for signs of readiness to do particular chores and academic tasks, allowing him to try all sorts of things, including things he may not be ready for. How­ever, don’t push him if things don’t click. Don’t be too quick to step in and solve all of your child’s problems, fix every mistake, right every wrong. Consider allowing her to suffer the natural consequences of her mis­takes. Of course, you will want to rescue your child from dire consequences – but watch for the no-biggies that your child can fix on her own. Reaffirm your belief that he can do it If your child has met with failure and seems to be giving up, reaffirm your belief that he can do it and then help him refocus on the task. Instead of repeating, “Try again! Work harder!” say something like, “I know you can do it if you keep trying. I wonder if you can figure out a pattern...” Create stepping stones Search for problems that are just a bit harder than the problems your child can already do. Studies of “flow” indicate that people get most excited, and learn best, when they face relatively small, doable challenges – rather than when they feel bored by already-mastered tasks or overwhelmed by seemingly impossible tasks. Teach kids to be “thought detectives” who can spot their own negative self-talk. Encour­age them to look for thoughts like, “Why bother, anyway?” or “I’m too stupid to learn this.” Once kids recognize these sorts of downer thoughts, they can replace them with positive self-talk such as “I’m good at ___, so I can probably do this, too,” or “This is a really hard problem, but if I try again, maybe I can solve it.” Encourage your child to take breaks. When we give our brains a rest, they continue to work on unsolved problems. Outdoor, physical activity can promote learning and problem solving. Tell your child these brain-facts, and then have her go for a walk or play an active game before returning to the problem. Be authentic and sincere. Encouragement to try again, harder, only helps when the child perceives the message (and the messenger) as credible. If he doesn’t believe your exhortations, he may feel more demoralized than encouraged. If you can see that your child is close to success, tell him so; however, if the task is obviously far above his capacities, praise the attempt but encourage him to turn his efforts elsewhere – and be sure to add “for now”!  Cathy Earle is an education writer who homeschooled her three daughters up to college. You can read what one of her daughters now writes about those experiences at The No-School Kids: A Homeschool Retrospec­tive, and you can find Cathy's free resource for kids at Every Day is Special.

Henry David Thoreau was an author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, environmentalist, surveyor, historian, gardener, and flautist – and he could paddle a canoe. In fact, he’s a great homeschool role model – one of the prime advantages of homeschooling, after all, is giving kids the freedom to pursue their own multifaceted interests, to think independently, and to follow their own different drummers. And he was born in the summertime - which makes this a perfect time for all things Thoreau. In D.B. Johnson’s Henry Hikes to Fitchburg (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), a picture book for ages 4-8, Henry and a friend (both bears) decide to travel to Fitchburg, 30 miles away. The friend opts to take the train; Henry, however, chooses to walk, enjoying nature along the way. There are several sequels, among them is Henry Builds a Cabin, in which Thoreau (as bear) settles in at Walden Pond. Check out the Take a Hike with Henry Activity, a project to accompany Henry Hikes to Fitchburg in which kids choose how they want to travel (hike or train) and keep short journals showing what they’ve learned along the way. Helpful links provide info. Robert Burleigh’s If You Spent a Day with Thoreau at Walden Pond (Henry Holt, 2002), for ages 5-10, begins as a little boy in blue jeans knocks on the door of a cabin in the woods - and then spends a wonderful day with the owner, Henry David Thoreau. It’s written in the second person, which gives the book a feel of immediacy and participation. (“If you spent a day with Henry David Thoreau, you would need to get up early because Henry wakes with the sun.”) Stephen Schnur’s Henry David’s House (Charlesbridge, 2007) is a picture-book adaptation of Walden for younger readers, illustrated with watercolor paintings. The text consists of short excerpts from the original book. (“My furniture, part of which I made myself, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs (one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society).”) Try pairing this one with your own build-a-chair project. There are a lot of kid-sized chair plans online, but it’s often more fun to hand out supplies, supervise, and let the kids experiment. Middle-grade books featuring Thoreau include Robin Vaupel’s My Contract with Henry (Holiday House, 2003) in which four eighth-graders build a cabin in the woods and set out to emulate Henry David Thoreau. They learn about themselves and their values in the process, and eventually make a difference by putting their beliefs into practice, when the woods are sold to developers. In Rebecca Rupp’s (yes, me; I can’t help myself) Octavia Boone’s Big Questions About Life, the Universe, and Everything (Candlewick, 2010), Octavia is struggling with questions about belief after her mother leaves the family to join a fundamentalist religious group called the Redeemers. With the help of her best friend Andrew (whose big questions are about everything from time travel to alien jellyfish) and some philosophy from Thoreau, Octavia finally comes to terms with her parents’ choices, learns some lessons, and begins to figure out what she believes herself. All her big questions aren’t answered yet – but then, as Henry says, “The universe is bigger than our views of it.” Cal Armistead’s Being Henry David (Albert Whitman, 2013) is a page-turner for ages 13 and up: a 17-year-old boy wakes up in Penn Station with no memory, ten dollars, and – his only clue - a copy of Thoreau’s Walden. He names himself Henry David and sets off for Concord, Massachusetts, to search for his past at Walden Pond – though his fragmented recollections tell him that his past may contain something terrible. Thoreau’s Walden and Civil Disobedience – available in many editions – are both standards on recommended reading lists for teenagers. The Thoreau Reader, sponsored by The Thoreau Society , is a terrific resource here: included at the site are online versions of all of Thoreau’s major (and some minor) works, with annotations, links, and photos, as well as dozens of informative articles, among them an essay on Winnie-the-Pooh as a Transcendentalist. (Pooh lives a simple life in the woods.) The related Teaching Thoreau page has background info, discussion questions, philosophical debates, and even a downloadable four-character, two-act play called “Walden: The Ballad of Thoreau.” (Free script with music.) Civil disobedience is the theme of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s play The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (Hill and Wang, 2001), a brilliant and witty account of Thoreau’s life and philosophy, set during the night Thoreau spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes to support the Mexican-American War – a war fought without Congressional approval and a blatant example of imperialism. It’s a fun and thought-provoking read: be prepared for discussion. For teenagers, The Great Courses – which offers high-school- and college-level courses on CD, DVD, or as audio downloads – carries a 24-lecture course, “Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement,” taught by Ashton Nichols, an English professor at Dickinson College. (Full price is daunting, but all of the Great Courses periodically go on sale at huge reductions.) And finally check out Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods (Algonquin Books, 2 008) which discusses the benefits ofunstructured outdoor play – that is, the chance to go outside and run around in the woods – and argues that our present-day alienation from nature is bringing on a damaging condition that the author calls “nature-deficit disorder.” Thoreau would have agreed. So put a book in your backpack and go for a hike. Pretend that you’re Henry, walking to Fitchburg.

As parent of two unschooled teens, creative director, and author, my most valued creative advice is: Don’t be a parent roadblock to natural curiosity! Curiosity fuels imaginative ideas, solves problems, and stimulates creative thinking. Understanding this idea can make the journey of homeschooling rewarding, help you identify when your child is thinking creatively, and open the road. Parents can become roadblocks to creative thinking without even knowing it. My expertise is in teaching creative visual arts, but my advice can be applied to almost any creative homeschool activity like cooking, building, crafting, homesteading, gardening, entrepreneur skills, pet care, and even basic life skills. Homeschooling and teaching has taught me valuable lessons about how curiosity is the link to creativity. How do parents roadblock creativity? For a number of reasons, parents often roadblock curiosity without truly understanding the value it has for stimulating creativity. Some parents may think exploring curiosity results in a messy house. Curiosity driven exploring may seem like a disorganized task to certain parents. Parents may feel problem-solving may not be as efficient as memorization. Or the child’s solution to a problem is different than what the parent had in mind or expected. Parents lacking the patience for curious exploring can create roadblocks to future creative thinking and independent problem solving. Having an open mind and understanding how parental roadblocks happen can help your child’s creative process. I’m not saying let your children run free and ransack your home by turning it into a science lab of daily experiment messes, just be aware of parent roadblocks to natural curiosity and creativity. Allow your children age appropriate challenges for problem-solving you are comfortable with managing. Or have the patience for your child to be challenged or curious and come up with their conclusions. Life can get very messy and misplaced when allowing children to explore and make mistakes, but over time these types of experiences are good. Natural curiosity fuels creativity. Children can come up with original solutions by developing their own, even erroneous, understanding of how things work. Children allowed to make mistakes and learn from them benefit from this experience of independent thinking. Creative thinking provides innovative solutions. Without curious exploration, creative thinking can’t happen. Cultivating the principles of curiosity, creativity, and child-led – the 3 C’s – can help a child hold on to their inward creativity and supply imagination. Many ask me why my own children and students are so creative and how to make their children more creative. I get very nice compliments that I’m a very gifted teacher. Well, I’m here to tell you the secret of my talent. I simply nurture the natural structuralism of the child, and provide the environment and opportunities to keep curiosity flourishing. The 3 C’s are my answer to what stimulates visual art creativity. These are the elements that mold creativity, imagination, and artistic skills within a child.  Childhood curiosity shouldn’t be taken for granted. Yes, children are curious by nature, but parents need to value their children’s creative pursuits and do what we can to protect their imagination and encourage their creativity. This idea aligns perfectly with the child’s holistic nature. Our curiosity about what lies beyond the stars and galaxy has driven innovation and technology beyond our wildest imagination. Curiosity fuels today’s amazing three-dimensional structures, scientific innovations, digital animations, and computer technology. All visual art communication is fueled by imagination and curiosity. In Of Children, Guy R. Lefrancois writes, “One of the few variables that successfully predicts later creativity is the presence of imaginary play, which tends to be more creativity than those who are not allowed play in this fashion.” Learning to identify when naturally occurring curiosity is leading a child to real learning is essential to nurturing. Playful curiosity can lead a child into deep levels of understanding. The action of art-making can be a playful and curious experience. I have observed thousands of young children painting with curiosity driving most of the imagery and playing. I’ve witnessed deep thoughts and curious actions leading to more painting exploration by the same children. Open the road to your child’s natural curiosity and creativity! Spramani Elaun has home educated her daughter (15) and son (13) since birth. All live in San Diego, CA. She is a designer + mommy + homeschooler + art teacher + art supplier turned author, and founder or Nature of Art For Kids Earth-friendly art supplies and art school. Learn all about her new books, products and art events at her website, EcoKidsArt .

Since we began unschooling, my appreciation for creativity has grown immeasurably. Starting out, I thought creativity was great for artists, yet not particularly useful beyond that. Over the years I came to see how valuable it is to have a creative approach to life, and that unschooling is a wonderful way to help children retain their creativity. I think children are naturally creative, but that many of our conventional parenting and teaching practices discourage its use. Let’s look at creativity from some different perspectives. Creative Arts We’ll start with the obvious visual and performance arts. With the conventional focus in childhood on right and wrong, judgment often funnels young artists into the “box.” The adult reactions to blue trees, dissonant chords, and new dance moves often send the message to young artists that their imagination should stay firmly within the bounds of reality and convention. One of my daughter’s favorite quotes is from Walt Disney, “Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.” With unschooling, a child is free, and encouraged, to follow their own path of engagement with the creative arts. That can be a very individual dance. At times they may be exploring the techniques, experiences, and ideas of other artists, both directly in their field of interest and beyond. And at other times, they may be pulling inward, connecting those thoughts to their own understanding, letting their imagination percolate and play. Unschooling parents are partners in this dance, sharing their thoughts and perspectives, while being careful not to fall into judgment, artificially restricting their child’s playground – their imagination. Analyzing Situations and Creative Solutions A “yes/no answer,” followed up with “because I said so,” is often the quickest way to move on in the moment, but there isn’t much learning or creative thinking happening there. One of the things that makes unschooling more time consuming is that rather than perpetuating the black and white distinction of right/wrong, we spend time looking at situations from various angles. In many everyday moments, there are other possible paths to take beyond “yes” to one person, “no” to the other. It’s possible that the needs of everyone involved be accommodated – it just takes some creative thinking to figure out how. Analyzing situations is about finding the real parameters and exploring the needs of those involved. From there, our minds can dance through the possibilities. Paths don’t need to be as the crow flies—sometimes efficiency isn’t the most important goal. That’s where original thinking shines! Sometimes I’m a bit stunned by how little creativity many adults put into their thinking. When a question or issue arises, they think of the typical answer and stop there. Anything outside the conventional has too much risk associated — they crave the comfort of the box. They can’t see the possibilities a bit further down the path, the tangible opportunities that may grow out of an unconventional experience. Imagine how useful these skills will be in adulthood! Being able to analyze situations and think creatively will help them in many ways, from discovering obscure yet rewarding paths to meet their own goals, to working with team members and finding unique ways to meet their company’s business goals, to exploring the possibilities of life with their own children. Are you finding your journey to unschooling is flexing your creative thinking muscles? Creative Learning  I am still amazed at how rich and fulfilling learning is, off the conventional path. When I started my unschooling journey, I was just beginning to glimpse the learning that can happen outside the school system. Over the years, that glimpse has shown me the rich and diverse landscape that learning can be. Unschoolers explore the world through their interests and passions, reaching out and connecting, learning, and growing. This real learning is understood and remembered, appreciated and enjoyed, and most often it’s fun! And it’s all around us. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Life is full of challenges. Yet unschooling helps young people discover the things they are so interested in that setbacks, even though disappointing, aren’t major deterrents. Instead, they are pieces of information that can be used to tweak their course. With unschoolers, their internal motivation is often extraordinary. Over the years, I’ve seen unschoolers take so many different paths to learning things, to finding a place in the adult world. As unschooling teens dig into their interests and passions, they find communities and make connections, whether face-to-face or online. Even when they dip into more conventional learning tools, like college, they come at it from an entirely different perspective because they are there by choice. They want to learn, not just get a degree. Not only do their unique learning experiences and passion for their field come across in their resume, but their excitement for their field of interest often means they are sought after by others as passionate as they are. Watching unschoolers move into the adult world is so interesting! I have come to treasure the creativity that unschooling nurtures. Giving the priority, space, and time to cultivate the perspective of being open-minded, seeing possibilities, thinking for themselves and seeing what happens, allows life to play out in marvelous ways time and again. Excerpt from Life through the Lens of Unschooling: A Living Joyfully Companion Pam Laricchia left her career as an engineer and happily began unschooling her three children in 2002. Watching them explore their interests and passions not only brings her joy, it has also been an incredible learning experience. Pam has written about unschooling for years including her books, Free to Learn , Free to Live and Life through the Lens of Unschooling.

If we begin at the very beginning, we’d start with definition, I suppose. We’d say that creativity means transcending the traditional or ordinary ways, and creating new ones. It is originality. For many home educators, creativity utilizes and engages that most dazzling mind-power of all – imagination. We can define it by breaking it up into familiar words that feel less ambiguous, but we’re still speaking of something that by its nature breaks all of its bonds. I look at creativity as a current, as energy that flows more easily the more we practice it. The first time we pause and step outside of the ordinary way of doing things, it begins. Our tools are libraries and their books. Building blocks. Websites dedicated to crafts. Pots of paint and sidewalk chalk, laptops and toy boxes. Since we often have the same resources inside our home, as well as in the world around us, nature and its seasons play a large part in inspiring my family’s creativity. Summertime is filled with beaches, sand, swimming, water balloons, painting en plein air, flowers, and butterflies. Autumn inspires play with clay, fantastically colored leaves, various weavings, dipping things in beeswax. Winter has its snowballs, sledding, and suncatchers made of ice. Spring! Spring makes us tingle after a long winter’s nap, with its greenly things poking through, inviting us to dig in the mud, as well as inspiring us to live in gorgeous color again. Since my children may not always feel as inspired by the seasons or our surroundings as I do, I recognize and acknowledge that, and use these things as my own inspiration in fostering their creativity. As an unschooling mama, there are a number of things that I do to make sure that we’re living creatively. I look through the community education papers that arrive in the mail. “Interested in diving lessons? Or dance?” I check in with my children through (funny and often insightful) interviews. We regularly go downstairs to the rumpus room and bring up stacks of games and books for inspiring play. Creativity is the very life force of home education. As soon as we stop accepting that things should be done “because it has always been,” we start to grow. Creativity begins. We begin by opening our mind and heart, and then forever thereafter ask “what are the choices?” We start practicing creativity by coming up with alternatives and more elevating options. We ask, seek, ponder, get inspired, and play. And there it goes! Cultivating creativity has many different facets. We – as families, parents, and individuals - have hundreds of different preferences, environments, and loves. Sometimes we can become utterly consumed by our interests – we want to spend all of our time drawing dragons or writing fan-fiction, inventing new tricks on bmx bikes, or writing game code. Some things are engulfing, and they seem to take us along for the ride. It seems that the act of creating isn’t even a practice, but rather something that is carrying us along. Alternatively, while living with passion is a grand thing, creativity isn’t always the serious matter of being wholly immersed or inflamed. It’s often seeing, hearing, tasting, or feeling something and getting a brilliant idea. A spark of magic that flashes in your head and makes you grin. That’s where the oh-so-wise parent comes in, ready with tickets to the museum or a play, the address of an intriguing website, a new stack of brilliant white paper, or a smile and an attitude of “let’s see what we can see...” Practically, we can present a project to our children and say, “Hey, maybe this?” and then smile with pleasure when they come up with something entirely different. Creative. Imaginative. The whole point of creativity, to me, is expressing our beautiful selves. We want our children to have a marvelous sense of being. We want them to be engaged in their lives. We want them to know themselves – and love themselves – so thoroughly that they do not have the slightest understanding of what it means to live or be educated on the mass production line. We want them to live their whole lives knowing what they are about and liking what they see. Creativity is a fine tool for that. Creativity insists upon joy. By its essence, it is reflective of the individual and her clever mind. It allows him a chance to feel, and then see, the shining light that is him and his. We only need to make way for it. We can make space in our home, leave lots of free time for it in our days, and be open to the (sometimes subtle) suggestions of inspiration. The most important component in tending creativity, I believe, is allowing it to be. Letting it flow. Allow it, recognize it, admire it, and be taken by it. Acknowledging that we have such a lovely thing in our lives and in our selves makes way for our ability to appreciate it – raising it in value, as well as increasing its flow. Much of the time, the creative process only begs laying out a couple of things on the proverbial table. A big one! One that asks all of its visitors “what if…”. Stephanie Sims believes that if she celebrates and cherishes as many moments as humanly possible with her two children, then they won’t grow up while she’s not looking. She follows them around with her camera, plays math and chemistry games with them, and tells their daily stories at her blog Ordinary Life Magic.

I first heard about artist trading cards (ATCs) a few years ago at a homeschooling conference. I sat in an open, sunny art room with a few parents and painted small pieces of paper. I gave some away, and did not think about them again until recently. Another homeschooling friend of mine came to visit and brought her travel-ATC kit. As we sat at my kitchen table, I made about fifteen ATCs. Over the next three days, I made 70 more. Artist Trading Cards are small pieces of art made out of almost any medium. Some people paint, draw, collage or even quilt them. Some are visual only, some have text, some have photographs, some are simple, some are elaborate. There is really only one rule - that they are 2.5 by 3.5 inches. Because they are so small, and the medium is varied, the whole idea is flexible. The end product can be different from person to person or even card to card. I have seen cards where the maker has spent hours focused on minute details on one small piece of paper the size of a playing card. I have seen others that are clearly part of a larger collection, where the maker creates dozens or even hundreds along the same theme. So far, I have tended to move from medium to medium, doing six to eight cards and then moving on. ATCs remind me of the flexibility that homeschooling offers: the ability to focus on one interest for hours or days or weeks or month or years yet also offering the chance to dabble in one thing and then another, quickly in succession. This flexibility is a huge benefit to being outside of the compulsory school system. I remember when I first began homeschooling, at the age of ten, that was one of the first benefits that I was able to fully articulate. I was so grateful for the uninterrupted hours to get to follow my interests, to have many resources at my disposal, to be able to jump from project to project on my own time, and to not have to pursue anything any longer than I wanted. Despite my personal gratitude and opinion, I have had many parents talk to me about their deep concerns regarding their children’s level of attention to one particular interest or activity. Some parents have children who flit from interest to interest. Parents worry that they will never be successful, develop expertise, get a job, be committed, pay rent, and so on. On the other hand, there are parents who have children that are truly content spending a great number of hours every day for years doing - what looks like on the outside - the exact same thing. Parents in this case use insulting language like “obsessed” and catastrophic language like “if I let them, that’s all they would EVER do.” Maybe if fearful parents looked at ATCs, they would ease a few of their worries. ATCs are the perfect metaphor. You can spend time on a piece of cardstock as big as a playing card, or you can make hundreds in fifteen minutes. People learn in both ways, and benefit from both methods. If you have used the word “obsessed” about your children’s activities, try to reframe it. Use the word “passionate” instead. Think gratefully about your child’s ability to focus and pursue something so wholeheartedly. If your child dabbles and has their fingers in a lot of different pies, ease your fears by thinking about the exposure they are getting, the patterns they are seeing and creating. Your goal when creating ATCs is one of pure intrinsic satisfaction. As a parent, I hope that you are watching your children with the same goal for them in mind. Watch them with wonder, and explore curiously what benefits they are getting from whatever they are doing no matter how many hours or seconds they spend doing it – because, guaranteed, they are getting something from it.  Roya Dedeaux , LMFT is a Marriage and Family Therapist Intern in private practice in southern California. She was homeschooled most of her life. She has a Master’s degree in counseling and specializes in art and experiential therapies, especially with teens and families, both in person and online.

Are your children being taught music as part of their homeschooling? There’s a good chance that they aren’t, as many parents don’t include it in their home teaching curriculum. And that’s not because they don’t value music or understand its benefits. They simply do not feel equipped to teach it and are rather daunted by the prospect. But learning music has so many benefits and not just for your child, but it can be a great experience for you too. Music lessons open the door to a world of learning. Learning about music and playing an instrument can have a huge impact on a child’s overall learning, whatever their age. It offers increased math abilities, language and reading skills, social skills, helps them to work better with others, encourages critical thinking skills, improves coordination and can even contribute to better academic test scores. Music lessons can be one of the greatest gifts you can give your children. A number of studies have shown that playing a musical instrument can improve memory and even just plucking the strings of a guitar can teach children all about basic physics, and sympathetic and harmonic vibrations. Learning to play an instrument is a gift for life If you want to encourage your child to learn to play an instrument, or they have asked to, then you need to decide which one. There are a few things to consider, like what will the child really enjoy playing? Do you and your child like the sound the instrument makes? Can you afford to purchase it and maintain it? The guitar is often a popular first instrument for young people to start with, especially as it makes such a wonderful sound. It offers a rewarding and fun experience and can open the door to many opportunities later on. But to get started, you need to choose the right guitar that suits your child. Consider the size that’s appropriate for them. The important thing to remember is that your child needs to be comfortable. Because if they aren’t, they won’t be able to concentrate and play properly. The type of guitar is also important. Acoustic guitars can be a good instrument to start playing with. The classical guitar is ideal for small hands and its nylon strings make it easier to play. The steel-string guitar might be a little harder for young children to play, but worth trying out before you decide. Teaching music is easier than you think As a homeschooler, it can be difficult to decide how to work music into home learning. If you want to, you can purchase a music curriculum, encourage your child to learn an instrument or join a music group. The important thing is to find something that works for you and your child. The point of unschooling is to make learning flexible and focused on the individual child. It doesn’t even matter if you don't yourself have any musical abilities at all. You can still appreciate music without being able to play. And remember, teaching music is just like teaching any other subject, you don’t have to be an expert. You just have to have the desire and enthusiasm to teach it. Discovering music at home There's no perfect unschooling handbook that everyone must follow. But what is important is giving children as big of a world as possible to learn and grow from. One way we can do this is by surrounding children with a variety of music and musical instruments. Music appreciation It shouldn't be difficult to weave music appreciation sessions into each day. Play many different musical styles for your children and help them recognize which one they're listening to. Include classical, jazz, musical theater, and popular music. Encourage them to sing along if there are words to the music. Just by listening to different music each day, you can discuss what you hear and your interpretation.Get them familiar with composers and allow them to ask questions about what they hear. Even listening to some basic children songs can help your child think of how they would compose their own song. Encourage them to write their own version of the song with their own words.Look at the links between music and other areas of your child’s education and learning. Can you link a particular type of music or composer to a specific period of history they are learning about? It’s easy to make music a big part of every day. Even just by listening to music in the car or have it on in the background during the day.A lot of areas host symphonies and summer band concerts and many do free children's concerts each year. Find one near you and take your children along. Any live music you can take your children to is fantastic for their learning. Encourage them to write down how they felt about the music. They could even draw their interpretation of what they heard. Exploring musical instruments Listen to a wide selection of artists and encourage your child to explore the sounds of the instruments they hear. Can they copy the sound?You can pick up cheap second-hand instruments if you'd rather not buy new. Or, invest in some rhythm sticks, handbells, drums and small xylophones. Encourage your children to use them to make up little tunes, play songs together and create their own rhythms.You don't even need traditional musical instruments. Get a set of tennis balls and encourage the children to bounce them in a steady beat. Wooden spoons work well too as rhythm sticks. Children can play follow the leader with rhythm games. They just need to try to match the leader's beat and can eve walk, clap or jump to the beat. They can even create their own instruments based on art and household supplies. Try decorating empty containers and fill with rice or beans and shake along to music.  Home education is about children exploring and discovering the world at their pace. And that's just how they should discover music. You don’t have to make it a complicated process and you don’t even need to know lots about music yourself. You can enjoy exploring and learning about music together.

Inevitably we all run into articles with dire warnings against the usage of "screen time". They will all cite experts that say that screens are addictive, that children need to interact with the "real" world, that kids will become violent or angry or lazy or become mindless zombies, or they aren't communicating with people in the same room (generally the parents), or they will just become bad, bad, bad. The advice given in such articles is to be a good parent and control all those screens by putting limits on usage. The most obvious part of such articles - something most people totally miss - is that kids who are using technology aren't being mindless automatons staring blankly at a screen. Savvy parents have known for a long time that research articles like this are doing studies on kids in school. Their studies are not being done with homeschooled or unschooled kids who have, presumably, a very different relationship with technology. How many kids do you know stare blankly at a screen - even schooled children who are using technology to decompress? I'd wager the number is VERY low. Looking at the graphic here to the right, many kids, most kids can do ALL of that, while also watching a movie, or YouTube videos, or playing a PC game at the same time. That's some hardcore multi-tasking. Kids aren't sitting passively with technology and their accompanying screens. It's the most ludicrous idea to suggest that that's what is going on. I've never seen it happen. Not even with toddlers who are actively using apps and exploring tablets and the like. I've know toddlers who figure out how to take selfies and do so intentionally. Think about how you learned how to do those things with phones and apps, over years, over time. Kids just do it, and then move on to the good stuff, the creative stuff, the interesting stuff. Adults tend to have a pretty steep learning curve. Kids will sometimes even use their phones to chat while sitting in the same room. It's not better, just different. It certainly doesn't mean kids are not having real conversations or real social interactions because they ARE. The kids that are often used in the articles supporting the idea that screen usage is bad, are probably doing that also - they just are not having conversations with the people who aren't using their phones. And maybe, just maybe all those kids who prefer to communicate via their phones, are finding the adults in their lives boring and not very stimulating. If parents want to be front and center in conversations - or life in general - with their kids, then they better be interesting. Because what's on your child's phone IS interesting! It's the whole world at their fingertips. If kids find you interesting enough to set their phone down, then they will do just that. Parents probably shouldn't be complaining about how much screen time their kids are using. There is almost nothing worse than a Debbie Downer who wants to find fault in something you love and enjoy doing.

Michelle Conaway shows us how technology may be changing how we view socialization. Parents may not be aware of all the skills kids are learning while they're playing games and interacting with friends online. It is hard to believe, but one of the most asked questions of homeschoolers is still about socialization. How will they learn to move around in social situations if they are stuck at home all day long? It is a tired-out question for homeschoolers and one that most of us have learned to laugh about. Homeschoolers have always tended to gravitate toward activities that build social skills. With the recent technology explosion, however, the subject of socialization has been up for debate in the world at large. Even among homeschooling parents, how and when to “socialize” our homeschooled youth has become an ongoing conversation. Does socializing our kids mean dragging them to park days, even if they don't want to go? Does it mean we force them to participate in outside events, when they would rather be sitting at their computer? Has the way we socialize in the world changed? What does socialize mean anyway? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines socialize as: : to talk to and do things with other people in a friendly way; : to teach (someone) to behave in a way that is acceptable in society. Years ago, the only way to socialize outside of the family was to physically go out into local surroundings. Parkdays, homeschool-events, teen jobs and volunteer efforts all occurred outside of the home. Today, the Internet is the new playground, with gaming events, volunteer options and even careers opportunities for kids to explore. Our kids have the entire world at their fingertips and no longer have to rely on demographics as a means of meeting like-minded friends and learning how to “behave in a way that is acceptable” on a global scale. And yet, many people still believe that phones, tablets and computer screens are turning our children into social drifters. Many of us want our kids to get out into the community and not spend so much time in front of screens. We may feel that that are being unsocial by spending so much time at their computers. It may seem logical to us that they should get out with local kids and do other things with much of their time. But maybe we need to rethink this. The world is changing and social media and online communication is where society is focused these days. Our kids instinctively know this and gravitate towards online interaction, which many times turns into real life gatherings organically. Both of my sons have enjoyed meeting people online, first to discover common interests and then for in-person gaming activities. Perhaps many parents don't understand the socialization skills their kids are gleaning from their time on social media such as Skype, gaming platforms and Facebook. The array of options that are available to our kids today demands a certain respect. Kids are learning through chats, live Skype conversations and collaborating on games to get along with others and create and maintain relationships. They're learning to create and share their work, assist others with skills they know a lot about and monitor their tone of voice and choice of words. They are learning to brainstorm possible responses to potentially adversarial situations and effectively handle online conflict. Let's put our focus on connecting with our kids and looking for the value in what they are interested in instead of fighting this new way of socializing. We can find out more about it. Why do they love that game they spend so much time on?Have they met friends from around the world that they play with?What are they learning on Facebook?Have they read any great articles posted there?Who are they following and why?What skills have they learned through collaborating on games?We may be pleasantly surprised with what we discover. Perhaps they've learned some coding or graphic design. Maybe they’ve found writing tips on Facebook. These are the jobs of the future and learning to work with others online is key to mastery of these skills. Gaining our kids' trust is so valuable. When they feel that their interests are valued, they are much more likely to open up and share with us what they are doing and learning. It's fascinating to see the connections they make. Through gaming, my boys socialize with friends from around the world. They're learning what it's like to live in a global society - a concept foreign to many parents. When we connect with our kids and genuinely appreciate what they are discovering through their use of phones, computers and tablets, we begin to see that they are learning valuable skills that will usher them into the future, shaping them into productive adults who are ready for our changing world. A relationship free of distrust and criticism goes a long way towards helping our kids open up about the what, when and why of their online activity. Being a willing partner to your child around screen time helps them develop the skills needed to communicate effectively and solve problems in the information age. As a trusted partner, our opinions and suggestions matter to our kids and we become a valuable influence to their online life. We are in a position to help them navigate the social ups and downs as well as help propel them forward into an unknown world. Our society as a whole would have us believe that it's unsocial for our kids to sit at a computer for extended amounts of time. But socialization today means something different than it did just a few short years ago. What was true then is no longer true today. Keeping an open mind and strong connection with our children will help them navigate the new social norms and make way for the future of communication in the technology age. Michelle Conaway lives at the beach with her husband and sons. She coordinates the wildly popular Texas Unschoolers Conference every spring and hosts two Facebook groups: Texas Unschoolers ' and Creative Unschooling Kids .

Jackie Edwards shares how kids can turn their passion for videogames into a lucrative career! Finally, some good news for those who like nothing better than to slip on headgear, get connected and strategize about the latest online tactical mission of World of Warcraft. Those who love playing their games will find they have inroads into an interesting career choice. Game designing might not be a get-rich-quick solution but it does pay well . Junior developers enjoy a starting salary similar to that of a flight attendant, and lead game designers earn around the same as nurse practitioners. Steps For Students To Follow To Become A Game Designer In order to become a game designer that stands out in a very competitive environment, it’s important to have the basics in place, but also go the extra mile to get noticed. Some of these include: The ability to work well in a team Game designers often have to work closely with game developers in order to get the product out. The game designer takes care of the concept and characters, while the game developer develops the software to bring the story to life. A solid foundation in education Some of the fields of study that are advantageous to this career include computer science, game design, practical programming, mathematics, and logic. A clear head during the interview process This can be a relentless process as recruiters work through the applications. There is an initial screening of the resumes and cover letters, telephonic interviews, technical interviews, and final interviews to consider. This means that your cover letter and resumes need to be drawn up professionally. A clear career direction There are quite a few roads to follow for a junior game designer as they work their way up the ladder. Some of the prospects include senior designer, lead designer on a project, starting their own consultancy, or starting a studio. The Connection Between Gaming and Education Apart from providing children and teenagers with hours of entertainment and fun, new developments in the gaming industry also inspire further learning in children. This allows the circle of fun and education to go full circle, as those gamers will one day have the opportunity to create products of their own, thanks to their homeschooling education. STEM education has never been more fun and provides children with a broader scope of reference. All four STEM branches make a significant contribution to the education of a game designer. Before Enrolling Into College There are a number of courses that homeschoolers can follow before they get to college and many of them are available online. Some of them are available to students from a young age. There are also countless resources available to students that will take them through the various stages of game design. These are styled in fun and creative ways and tend to feel more like games than actual training. They will also have exposure to programming and the chance to learn how to create 3D animation. Many of the options are free, however, some require payment in order to progress to higher levels or for the full course.

Unschooling parent, Natasha Allan, overcomes her anxieties about YouTube and finds herself embracing her daughter's technological curiosity. My daughter loves her YouTubers, she has an array of favorites. She loves watching them create things, open things, explore things... she loves YouTube. I love it. But I didn’t always love YouTube when it came to my daughter watching it. It can be difficult to jump in and find the YouTube joy when generally-shared conventional beliefs try to reinforce: "No child should have access to YouTube" "No child should be watching YouTube when they can be doing..." "You should limit your child’s access to YouTube because they'll become..." “Children shouldn’t have access to ‘screens’ until they’re X years old”… We've all heard it. The fear. I get it. This is new territory, unchartered waters for parents. This is the first generation of kids born into a world where Saturday morning cartoons peppered with commercials have transformed into constant video access where the commercials are the video. Toy challenges, toy unboxing, toy reviews, toy companies creating shows specifically to showcase new product. This generation is not growing up with product placement they're growing up with product and a lot of it. Our process to get to where we are today was a shaky one. Oh my geez it's been a challenge. I've convinced myself that my daughter will grow up to be a consumer surrounded by nothing but shelves upon shelves of excess. I've convinced myself that the only way to avoid this fate was to STOP ALL BLIND BAG VIDEOS! Well... thankfully we didn't. But we did stop looking to the future of what may be and instead focused on what is. How could we think we had the ability to come up with what her future would look like? We were basing our assumptions and predictions on what was before but our before didn’t include unschoolers watching YouTube without limits. It included us as schooled children controlled at every turn. Children who had limits set upon them, kids who grew up in environments where we weren’t trusted or supported to choose wisely but told at every turn what we were to do and not do. We come from a world where “if you give them an inch…” was uttered daily. Instead we set those fears aside and dove into supporting our daughter in having unlimited access. We installed Kids Youtube on her iPad and on an old iPhone of mine. We didn’t throw caution to the wind and wish her luck. We are always available to help her in searching for videos; we are always available to watch along with her when she wants company. We stay close by to be supportive and help her navigate this world. We learn about what she’s watching and chat about it with her. We develop our own relationship with the YouTubers she likes which allows for discussions that aren’t “Which one was that again?” but more “Oh man, I love how Cookie is making that dress out of Play-Doh, it’s similar to how she made dresses for pregnant Barbie’s in her last video!” My Calm is Her Calm The tension that existed from my inner conflict regarding YouTube and certain TV shows was way more powerful and way more damaging than any blind bag video. My resistance to where my daughter was and where she finds joy created horrible tension and even if I tried to mask my contempt for these videos she was internalizing my feelings. That's not ok. This is the opposite of support. This will damage our relationship and this could damage her ability to love and accept herself. Instead I choose to look for the good in the videos, TV shows and movies she enjoys. I could pick apart any Disney movie like a champ and my instinct used to be to do so but now I enjoy them with her and watch through her eyes. It’s important to remember and I find myself thinking about this often, living this path as an Unshcooling Family is foreign to me. I didn’t grow up this way. I didn’t even know unschooling was a thing until after my daughter was born. I had hoped we would homeschool but unschooling was absolutely new to me, it has been an amazing choice for us. It is hard to let go of the thoughts and beliefs that are deeply engrained. It is challenging to break out of the old mold and blossom into something completely different. It takes a constant willingness to change and evolve. It takes a willingness to let go of the idea that you are the teacher, you know better and you are the authority. Rather you are the partner. You are the facilitator. You are the supporter, nurturer, and helper. I'm deep in deschooling mode. I have beliefs, words and sayings integrated in who I have become. Just when I feel the ground under me has settled, it shifts and sometimes erupts throwing me up in the air. I watch as these beliefs and words that belong to someone else fly and swirl out of my mind leaving room for new thoughts and beliefs. New thoughts where I am my children’s partner, supporting, walking along side them on their journey not in front not behind. Evolution to YouTuber My daughter has started making her own videos, all the time. She records herself doing things like opening toys, running around the yard, playing with things, making things, chatting about things. She really wants a YouTube channel. She greets her fans when she begins filming and signs off reminding her fans to subscribe. She talks to them saying “Hi guys!” taking them on adventures. She has called her channel “Lemon’s Magic Yummy World”. She decided what her banner would look like and has begun to think of ways to integrate live motion into her opening credits. It’s incredible to watch her have fun, learn, expand and grow. And in this case it’s a whirlwind of ideas and growth surrounding her love of YouTube. Recently she watched one of her favorite YouTubers go through a drive-thru in her mini car, ordering her own food and paying herself. Lemon was overjoyed when she watched this episode. She asked if we could do that with her mini tractor. I hesitated then said, “Yes, of course we can, it’s a bit too late to go tonight so we’ll do it tomorrow”. “Huh? We can?” I thought. Tomorrow rolled around; we all spent the day playing, doing this and that around the house then in the afternoon my husband and Lem went down the street to say hello to our friends. When they came home Lemon asked “So are we going to the drive-thru now?” (The drive-thru idea made me feel anxious, I secretly had hoped it would fade). We sat in the kitchen and figured out our next move. Is it possible for a 5 year old to drive a mini tractor through a drive-thru? We were going to find out. This is an interesting part for me. Going through a drive-thru in a mini vehicle at 5 years of age is something I would never have done. Nor is it something I think my parents would have helped me do. So while I love my daughter’s fearless nature, her unbridled curiosity and sense of adventure the idea of going through with this made me feel very nervous. I know without a doubt this feeling exists from when I was young. It was a response I had many times growing up wishing to stay inconspicuous. Stay out of the aim of any authority figure; slide by unnoticed. It’s ironic that I became an actor in my 20’s but that’s for another post. So off we went, piling in the van with the mini tractor loaded in the back, charged and ready to go. After a failed attempt at driving through without speaking with the restaurant first (I didn’t know this but the drive-thru microphones and speakers are triggered by weight, her little tractor wasn’t heavy enough to trigger their system) Lemon and I walked into the restaurant and asked to speak with the manager. Again… this made me feel uncomfortable. I don’t like calling attention to myself yet here I am, walking in the restaurant asking if my 5-year-old daughter can drive her mini tractor through their drive-thru. What? Me: “Hello, my daughter has a YouTube channel and would like to film herself driving through the drive-thru in her mini tractor. Is that possible?” (Oh my god. They think I’m nuts, this woman is going to laugh us right out of Dodge.) Manager: “YES! Of course that’s possible!” Me: “AMAZING! Lemon, it's going to happen! IT’S REALLY GOING TO HAPPEN!” Manager: “Just go to the outside lane and we’ll turn on the microphone for you to order.” Lemon was beaming. Floating on air. Outside we went. Lemon hopped back in her tractor and off she went. We filmed her driving through, ordering, paying, having her photo taken at the second window while *all* the employees tried to catch a glimpse of her. It was hilarious and crazy and all things fun. I’ve finally edited Lemon’s first YouTube video, it’s uploading as I write. I took time after the kids fell asleep or while they were busy playing with Papa here and there. We watched it together today, all four of us. Oli’s little hands clapping along with the music, big smiles on everyone’s faces. I don’t know what will come of this, a few months of video making, maybe a few years… a better camera, learning how to film better? I don’t know. And that is ok. All I know is right now my daughter loves making videos and loves that she has her own YouTube channel. She thinks that is the coolest thing on the planet. We’ll roll with it and have fun along the way, following her joy. I’ve come to learn a lot about myself as a parent. I’ve come to learn even more as an unschooling parent deeply immersed in deschooling. If I can just get myself out of the way a little bit, focus on my children’s interests and partner with them to help them succeed, life will be magical. Not always easy but I don’t think that’s the point. Magical. Full of opportunities to look deeper, deeper within myself at how I was raised in this world and deeper into how to be a better supportive partner to my children. Natasha Allan Before becoming a mother Natasha was an actor. She also owned and ran a dog walking/boarding company in Toronto, Ontario Canada. She and her family now live outside the city where she is focusing her energy on becoming a better parent everyday through radically unschooling her two glorious children and is learning different techniques to help abused and neglected horses recover from trauma. Natasha writes about her radical unschooling journey at her blog, Follow the Joy and is a moderator at the Unschooling Mom2Mom Facebook groups.

We often hear bad news about Americans and science. The litany may include such things as:Americans are woefully ignorant about science;Americans do not trust scientists;American kids don’t want to get into “hard” subjects, and not nearly enough of them train in the sciences;The thing is... none of it is particularly true! The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) recent study revealed that a whopping 90% of the American public claim that they do respect scientists, and the same percentage say that they are interested in hearing the latest scientific findings. Most see scientists as people who are “helping to solve challenging problems,” who are working for “the good of humanity.” About one third of respondents think that science and technology should get more funding. Studies also show that, although, of course, there is room for improvement, American adults lead the world in scientific literacy. Lead the world! Also, Americans’ scientific literacy scores are improving; one source says that they have tripled since the mid- 1980s. And studies show that this “more knowledgeable” thing starts young; there is evidence that American kids—the same kids that so many hand-wringing articles have been written about—know more than they have at any point in the past. Also apparently inaccurate is the oft- repeated claim that America has a shortage of science and engineering college students and graduates. The government tells us that only 16% of high school seniors are “proficient in math” and interested in Science/Technology/Engineering/Math (STEM) careers, but other statistics tell us that only 5% to 9% (depending on what you include) of Americans work in STEM fields. According to “risk ecologist” Robert N. Charette, a number of studies show that there is a surplus, not a deficit, of trained STEM workers—so much that most people with STEM diplomas end up going into non-STEM careers because there aren’t job openings in their fields of choice. He also says that leaders in other nations—England, India, Brazil, just to name a few—beat the same “we’re behind the world” drum. I was very intrigued by the tail end of several articles about the NSF study; they mentioned that America tends to be relatively good at “informal” science education. Most of us get to visit the occasional zoo, aquarium or science museum, and we learn cool stuff about science and technology on the internet and on television. When I read that, I thought, “Yes! We’re deschooling science!” Again, don’t get me wrong – there’s room for improvement in the general public’s knowledge of science. Lots of room for improvement! But finding that those societies that are more knowledgeable about science are also those that more often partake in informal learning environments is confirmation that unschooling works and that learning is lifelong. There have never been so many ways to learn so much about science, math, engineering and technology; and there have never been so many ways to participate in, and even contribute to, STEM fields. Homeschooling families, with their ability to be flexible and cater to individuals’ interests, are especially well positioned to grasp these opportunities. We often hear bad news about Americans and science. The litany may include such things as:Americans are woefully ignorant about science;Americans do not trust scientists;American kids don’t want to get into “hard” subjects, and not nearly enough of them train in the sciences;The thing is... none of it is particularly true! The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) recent study revealed that a whopping 90% of the American public claim that they do respect scientists, and the same percentage say that they are interested in hearing the latest scientific findings. Most see scientists as people who are “helping to solve challenging problems,” who are working for “the good of humanity.” About one third of respondents think that science and technology should get more funding. Studies also show that, although, of course, there is room for improvement, American adults lead the world in scientific literacy. Lead the world! Also, Americans’ scientific literacy scores are improving; one source says that they have tripled since the mid- 1980s. And studies show that this “more knowledgeable” thing starts young; there is evidence that American kids—the same kids that so many hand-wringing articles have been written about—know more than they have at any point in the past. Also apparently inaccurate is the oft- repeated claim that America has a shortage of science and engineering college students and graduates. The government tells us that only 16% of high school seniors are “proficient in math” and interested in Science/Technology/Engineering/Math (STEM) careers, but other statistics tell us that only 5% to 9% (depending on what you include) of Americans work in STEM fields. According to “risk ecologist” Robert N. Charette, a number of studies show that there is a surplus, not a deficit, of trained STEM workers—so much that most people with STEM diplomas end up going into non-STEM careers because there aren’t job openings in their fields of choice. He also says that leaders in other nations—England, India, Brazil, just to name a few—beat the same “we’re behind the world” drum. I was very intrigued by the tail end of several articles about the NSF study; they mentioned that America tends to be relatively good at “informal” science education. Most of us get to visit the occasional zoo, aquarium or science museum, and we learn cool stuff about science and technology on the internet and on television. When I read that, I thought, “Yes! We’re deschooling science!” Again, don’t get me wrong – there’s room for improvement in the general public’s knowledge of science. Lots of room for improvement! But finding that those societies that are more knowledgeable about science are also those that more often partake in informal learning environments is confirmation that unschooling works and that learning is lifelong. There have never been so many ways to learn so much about science, math, engineering and technology; and there have never been so many ways to participate in, and even contribute to, STEM fields. Homeschooling families, with their ability to be flexible and cater to individuals’ interests, are especially well positioned to grasp these opportunities.

Of all the subjects we study in school, science is one of the most useful and one of the most neglected. It is one of the most useful because it explains how the natural and physical world, including our own bodies, works. It determines many of the practical decisions we make each day, and is indeed as integral as language in our daily lives. It is neglected by habit, perhaps, because it is often taught in a way that makes it feel inaccessible without a college degree. Even though we give lip service to the importance of learning science, it is still sometimes viewed as an ancillary subject. If you do not understand the basic fundamentals of science, you are relying on someone else’s interpretation of what the data means - something no good scientist would be happy about. It is alarming how many people do not understand the science behind basic issues, even the ones that directly relate to their health. Because of this, many scientific issues have become politicized. The process with these every- day issues would work differently if the dialogue went more like this: “These were the experiments conducted, this was what we observed, and based on our observations these are our conclusions. What do you conclude from this data?” Science is best taught with an emphasis on foundational fundamentals, allowing students to understand the underlying principles that form the basics of scientific knowledge. Without a firm foundation and grasp of the fundamentals, we cannot come to a deep and nuanced understanding of the topics that science deserves. Teach- ing theory, paired closely with experiments that investigate and give insight into theory, provides a more comprehensive approach. When that is done, students will be competent at implementing science practices, interpreting data and forming their own conclusions. Recommendations for learning science: Start early. Can you imagine starting to learn math or language in high school? There are so many parts to these subjects, and science is no different in depth or complexity. A high school student may learn the subjects faster and retain more, but coming to a deep and nuanced understanding of the material isn’t as likely. Take foreign language as an example. If you overhear a conversation in a language that you don’t speak, you will most likely notice it and tune it out. If you know a few words in that language, the experience is different. You will recognize the language, listen to the conversation, try to figure out what they are saying and you might even engage in the conversation. It is similar with science. If you have no knowledge of it, you may tune it out. If you have some knowledge, you have hooks into that subject, and you will engage and interact with it. Focus on the fundamentals. An important aspect of learning science is learning how to use the scientific method. Using the scientific method depends on knowing the basic facts of science. Learn each discipline as a single subject. When children learn science by a grab-bag approach to random facts, they are unable to make connections between disciplines. A better approach is to expose the child to a cohesive body of fundamental knowledge, approaching each subject or discipline thoroughly and separately Rely on one or more good textbooks. Every area of science has a lot of information to it. It helps to have a guide to help you figure out the scope and sequence of the material to cover. Choose texts that are comprehensive and do not skip over the basics, introducing advanced topics with a focus on the fundamentals. I do not think it matters which area of science you start with. Carefully pair theory with labs and activities. This enhances an understanding of the scientific method and science learning. It demonstrates through use and practice how hypotheses are formed and conclusions determined based on facts already known and the data from lab work. Try the accompanying experiment. This experiment shows a pairing of theory with an activity, leading to a better under- standing of the topic than either learning strategy alone would give. Then take this knowledge gained and see if it applies to issues people may be facing today.

Resources for writers include everything from how-tos and technical helps to story starters and imagination triggers, graphic novel templates, book crafts, writing contests and challenges, advice on getting published, and fiction and non-fiction books featuring characters who write. And we’ve all got our scribbling favorites among these last. Think of the trouble-prone Harriet of Harriet the Spy ; tomboy Jo of Little Women; imaginative Anne of Anne of Green Gables ; struggling Francie of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn . There’s also a great little red chicken. In David Ezra Stein’s picture book Interrupting Chicken (Candlewick, 2010), a patient father rooster (in spectacles and carpet slippers) tucks his offspring, a little red chicken, into bed and attempts to read a bedtime story. He’s continually interrupted in the process by his daughter, who simply can’t bear either the plot line or the suspense. “Out jumped a little red chicken,” she cries, as her father reaches a crucial point in Hansel and Gretel, “and she said ‘DON’T GO IN! SHE’S A WITCH!’ So Hansel and Gretel didn’t. THE END!” Finally the little red chicken decides to write a better story of her own, only to be interrupted by her tired father’s snores. Kate Duke’s Aunt Isabel Tells a Good One (Puffin, 1994) is a nice introduction to the storytelling process for beginners. Penelope, a little mouse, wants a story from her Aunt Isabel – but a story, Aunt Isabel explains, needs just the right ingredients, such as “a When and a Where.” With a lot of imaginative help from Penelope, Aunt Isabel comes up with a perfect plot, complete with setting, characters (valiant Lady Nell, a captive prince, and a villainous Odious Mole), conflict, suspense, and a happy ending. Storytelling is the theme of Dr. Seuss’s And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (Random House, 1989). Marco hasn’t seen anything on the way home from school but a horse and a wagon (“That can’t be my story. That’s only a start.”) – so he proceeds to add imaginative embellishments, each more fabulous than the last. Marco is a born writer and somebody should have handed him a pencil. (Find out more about And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street at NPR’s How Dr. Seuss Got His Start .) Now a classic for creative storytellers is Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), an evocative and story-provoking collection of fourteen black-and-white pictures, each with a title and a line or two of text. “Mr. Linden’s Library,” for example, shows a girl asleep with an open book beside her from which a leafy vine is sprouting. “He had warned her about the book,” the caption reads, “Now it was too late.” A seven-session lesson plan from ReadWriteThink encourages kids to write stories based on The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, using an interactive Mystery Cube that generates planning sheets for inventing characters and devising plots. Author Gail Carson Levine’s Writing Magic (HarperCollins, 2006) for ages 9 and up is a chatty and helpful guide for young writers, filled with stories about Levine’s own experiences as a writer, information about the writing process, and writing exercises. It starts off with a bang, with a list of proposed first sentences that are bound to get kids reaching for pen or keyboard: I have one green eye and one brown eye. The green eye sees truth, but the brown eye sees much, much more. The ghost was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The first time I saw Stephen, he painted a hex sign on my right arm, and I couldn’t move my fingers for three hours. You might also try Mark Twain’s Mantelpiece , an exercise that we’ve had fun with in writing workshops I’ve done with kids. Twain, when his daughters were young, used to let the girls choose three objects from around the house and line them up on the mantelpiece; then he’d incorporate their choices into a story. Try making your own: you’ll need a cardboard mantelpiece and an envelope filled with words on slips of paper or cardstock (emerald, witch, elephant, sword, slipper, bottle, cat, rocket…). Choose three at random and you’re off and writing. By A.S. Newman and P.C. Trauth, 365 Things to Write About (TNA Publishing, 2011) consists of 365 lined pages with a short writing prompt at the top of each. Examples include airplane, Alaska, aliens, the color red, a galaxy, a potion, quicksand, the Taj Mahal, a trap door. Hank Kellner’s Write What You See (Prufrock Press, 2009) is a collection of 99 photos intended to inspire writing, each with an accompanying quotation and list of questions. Also by Kellner, see Reflect and Write (Prufrock Press, 2013), a collection of 300 poems and photographs, with suggestions for using these as creative writing prompts. More fun, though, is to make a pictorial writing prompt collection of your own. Ours – collected from the Internet and our own photo collection and glued onto cardstock – is an eclectic pack of everything from a flock of crows to a pair of robots, a knight on horseback, an abandoned Victorian house, a steam locomotive, and an erupting volcano. Pick a card and write a story. From The Teachers Corner, Daily Writing Prompts has a writing challenge or two for every day of the year, variously based on holidays, anniversaries, famous birthdays, and historical events. The writing suggestions aren’t always the snappiest, but the daily event list is useful for inventing writing projects of your own. Also check out Daily Writing Prompt , another teacher-created site, which features daily writing suggestions, story starters, story-prompt-generating games, and “Today in History” prompts. The Storymatic , according to their website, is “a writing prompt, a teaching tool, a parlor game, and a toy” – all in a single box. The original version, recommended for ages 12 and up, is a collection of 540 cards in two colors. Players draw two gold cards to create a main character – say “royalty” and “pig” – and two copper-colored cards as story starters, such as “invitation from a stranger” and “talking doll.” The challenge is to write, tell, or co-invent a story based on your cards. For ages 5 and up, there’s a Storymatic Kids version, with 360 cards in yellow and blue; and for history buffs, there’s a Storymatic Colonial History Edition. Each set costs $29.95. Think-ets – “the tiny trinket game of imaginative play,” recommended for ages 8 and up – also function as story starters but have the added attraction of entrancing teeny little objects. Think-ets come in a pouch or box; trinket collections may include, for example, a miniature compass, a gold ring, a shell, a pig, an airplane, a bird’s egg, a bottle, and a thimble. Combinations of objects are used to invent stories. (And they’re fun to play with.) Each collection costs about $10. Barbara Slate’s You Can Do a Graphic Novel (Richard Minsky, 2014) is a catchy guide to writing graphic novels - in the form of a graphic novel. It covers all the basics: drawing, creating characters, designing plots, and choosing layouts. (Among the helpful advice: don’t count on your mother for reliable feedback. “Pick someone who doesn’t adore you so much.”) See Donna Young’s Printable Comic Strip Templates for a large selection of blank strips, squares, and panels for making your own comics or graphic stories. Want to make your own books? Gwen Diehn’s Making Books That Fly, Fold, Wrap, Hide, Pop Up, Twist, & Turn (Lark Books, 2006) has photo-illustrated, step-by-step instructions for making dozens of gorgeous books, among them an accordion-fold book with pockets, a ring-bound journal, and a tetraflexagon book. Make Peek-a-Boo Books is a project for preschoolers, in which kids – with a little help – make simple word-and-picture books. (See the word, lift the flap, and see the picture.) Bookmaking with Children: Accordion Books has instructions for making a particularly nice accordion book, using cardstock and colored paper. From Artists Helping Children, Bookmaking Crafts has dozens of book projects for kids and teens. Envelope Book has detailed instructions for making a bound book from twelve envelopes (which you can then fill with cool stuff). Not for the very young – this one is a little tricky – but definitely worth the effort. And finally – where to get published? The Writer’s Slate publishes original poetry and prose by writers in grades K-12. Three issues are published each year. Stone Soup publishes stories, poems, and artwork by kids ages 8-13. Six issues are published each year; an annual print subscription costs $37. New Moon Girls is written primarily by girls ages 8 and up. Merlyn’s Pen is a magazine of short stories, essays, and poems by teens. Check the website for submission guidelines. And if you’re up for a real challenge, check out the Nanowrimo Young Writers Program . Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month, a literary marathon event held each year in November, during with participating writers share the goal of writing a novel in a month. The Young Writers Program is designed for kids, either working in groups or writing solo. Reach your goal and you can publish your work via CreateSpace.  For more resources for writers of all ages, see Writing: Facts, Fiction, Fantasy, and Beyond. Rebecca Rupp lives in Vermont and has written nearly two dozen books - fiction and non-fiction - for both children and adults, as well as several books and many articles on homeschooling. She has been an educational consultant for the American Library Association and the Vermont Cen­ter for the Book; she blogs on food science and history for National Geographic and at her own blog, Let’s Learn All About It

research-based strategies for helping children become better writers In the Big 3 of education – readin', writin', and 'rithmetic – writing is seen by many as the most difficult to teach. In some ways, this is surprising. Writing, after all, is a lot like talking – and almost all children learn to talk easily and early, with little or no formal instruction. Also, isn't writing just the inverse of reading? Shouldn't they be about equal in difficulty? Actually, the relationships between writing and talking, and between writing and reading, are complex. It's actually quite painful to read exact transcriptions of what people say – with all the “um's” and “okay's” – and when we talk, our facial expressions, gestures, and physical context often provide a lot of information to the listener that needs to otherwise be provided in written communications. As to comparing writing and reading, consider how much easier it is to read a great novel than to write a great novel. Even for professional writers, it's just not all that easy to write well! There are at least four major types of writing challenges: Having something to say Writing clearly, Holding a reader's attention, and Mechanics of writing. According to Amy Gillespie and Steve Graham, in Evidence-Based Practices for Teaching Writing , research has shown that some practices are effective in helping children, ages 9 or so and up, become better writers. I have grouped some of their research-based recommendations by the writing challenges they address. Having Something to Say... In a classroom or formal homeschool setting, this is the biggest of the biggies – kids are asked to write _____ (a poem, an essay, etc.), but they actually don't have anything they really want to say! In unschooling and real-world situations, writing doesn't happen until someone DOES have something to say; there is a purpose for the writing, and an audience. Classroom and formal homeschoolers should look for opportunities for this sort of writing as much as possible, too. Remember to be flexible; “writing” isn't just one schoolish kind of thing. People write to build relationships with others (ranging from thank you notes to Grandma to text messages to friends), to help others get things done (from recipes to DIY articles), to express personal thoughts and remember personal experiences (from diaries to trip journals), to engage with the larger society (from posts and tweets on social media to letters to politicians), to communicate with other workers or students and teachers (from memos to reports), and to participate in the arts (from poetry and song lyrics to short stories and essays and novels). Whenever opportunities come up for writing, offer to help your child express himself well. Even more important, acknowledge the importance of these writing experiences; a child writing for her own purpose, no matter how small a writing project, no matter how informal the product, can be worth way more than a child writing for an arbitrary assignment. If you want your child to learn how to write on assigned topics, or to write specific kinds of things, here are some research-backed ways to help inspire him to have something to say: Encourage your child to read good quality examples of the type of writing that will be attempted. For example, if your son is going to write haiku, urge him to read several great haiku. If your daughter is about to write directions for a game, have her study several sets of game directions. Show your child brainstorming techniques. Remember that one idea can lead to another, and another – and tell your child not to allow negative talk (“I couldn't do that” - “that won't work”) in a brainstorming session. Demonstrate free-writing, in which you just dive in: start writing and don't stop for five minutes (or so), even if you run out of things to say. If you can't get started or peter out, write “I'm not sure what to say – I'm not sure what to say” until you think of something else to write. Free-writing can spur some good ideas! Creative writing prompts can help inspire kids; however, in general, events and experiences tend to inspire more passionate writing than pictures do, and pictures tend to inspire writing better than words. Writing Clearly... Writing clear sentences, paragraphs, and essays seems like the challenging part – but, in actual fact, writing is itself a tool for thinking, and it is thinking clearly that is the most challenging part of writing clearly. Most people think of writing as getting an idea and then writing it down. Of course, this can happen! However, during most writing projects of any length, writers think of things that they didn't have in mind when they first set fingers to keyboard (or pen to paper). Because of this, writing non-fiction can be a process of discovering what one thinks about a topic, and writing fiction can be as exciting for the author – I wonder what happens! – as it hopefully is for the reader. Furthermore, writing is a process that almost always includes (or at least almost always should include) reading what has been written, rewriting, rereading, and further rewriting, tweaking, and polishing. Good writers read their pieces aloud, if possible, so that they can hear mistakes and ambiguities that they did not see. Good writers also have others read their pieces, if possible, so that they can get feedback on which parts work and which don't. As she reworks the confusing bits, a writer's thinking about a topic actually becomes more and more clear. Great ways to support thinking and writing clearly: Rewrites. Teach your child to reread what he has written, and to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Obviously, this is a lot easier if you urge your child to use a computer and word processing software. As a matter of fact, word processing software may be the Number 1 tool to helping people write better, because it makes editing, reorganizing, and rewriting so much easier. Editing/Feedback. Offer, not just your proofing services to spot typos, but also feedback several times during the writing process. Point out where a piece gets unclear, or repetitive, or meandering. Critique Groups. Many professional writers use critique groups to hone their writing, and kids often respond very well to their work being read aloud within a small group, with everyone giving suggestions and feedback. This works best if an adult participates in the “crit group” by also writing, reading aloud, and getting feedback on his or her own writing. Remind kids that EVERY writer can improve – and the idea behind a crit group is not to compare writers to others in the group (let alone to published authors), but rather to help each member improve the piece being critiqued. A homeschool support group might be a perfect group in which to run a kids' crit group, since kids of different ages are less likely to compare themselves to others. Hint: When I run a kids' crit group, I read aloud all the pieces, rather than having each writer read his own piece, and I don't mention the writers' names. Although the writer of each piece is usually glad to claim his writing during the feedback discussion, this allows for anonymity if the writer wishes it. A Change of Scenery. When a kid cannot express an idea clearly in writing, have her try to express it orally. Taking a break from writing can help the writing process, and doing something physical often helps to clear the cobwebs. Doing all three at once (a chance to clarify a point orally, a break from writing, AND physical exercise) might be best accomplished by taking a walk with the stymied writer and asking her to explain the idea orally. Be ready to ask clarifying questions, point out weak arguments, and identify confusing statements. There may come a point five or ten minutes into the walk when your kid fully realizes what she was trying to say. Holding a Reader's Attention... School kids often do not even consider the need to attract and hold a reader's attention when writing essays, reports, stories, or poems for a teacher; ditto formally homeschooled kids writing for their parents. I suppose that the assumption is that the teacher or parent is a sort of captive audience who HAS to read whatever is written (just as much as the child “has” to write it). However, even for the most formulaic or academic writing tasks – and certainly for real-world writing – capturing and holding the reader's attention should be a huge goal for every writer. For example, even many unschoolers will eventually take standardized tests such as the SAT. And we know that the readers who grade SAT essays spend very little time on each one. Ask your child to imagine reading dozens of essays that start in one of these two ways: (1) “I think that listening is more important, even, than speaking when you are trying to persuade others, because...” or (2) “I think that speaking is more important than listening when you are trying to persuade others, because...” If you'd read, say, 32 essays that started almost exactly one of these two ways and then come across a more interesting essay opening – something, perhaps, like “My family's dinner table is a bit like a Fight Club of the Mental Kind. We debate important issues almost every night, and we can be pretty hard-hitting...” Well, I think you would wake up, take notice, and feel much more positive about the rest of the essay in sheer gratitude for a more original beginning! Research shows that teaching kids explicit steps to catching and holding a reader's attention can pay off, big-time.The beginning of an essay or story needs a “hook” – a statement or question that will grab a reader's attention and make him wonder about the topic or story. To find the hook, sometimes it's necessary to write a paragraph or two – or even a page or two – before discovering the anecdote, statement, or question that should begin the piece. Good writers consider “voice” – their own personality coming through the writing. Even textbooks are better when an author's voice can be “heard” in the writing! Tell your child that “voice” comes from revealing his viewpoint. Of course, he will have to tailor his vocabulary and writing style to the needs of the piece he is writing, but he should still try to be true to his own authentic self. Point out examples of effective writers breaking “rules” in order to produce a strong voice or to evoke emotions. For example, beginning writers are often told to avoid repetition, but Martin Luther King, Jr., used repetition in a powerful way in his I Have a Dream speech. Students are told over and over again that sentences should be complete, having at the very least a subject (featuring one or more nouns or pronouns) and a predicate (featuring one or more verbs). However, sentence fragments can be effective in both creative and informal writing. Here is an example of sentence fragments (AND repetition) from A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle:“IT was a brain. A disembodied brain. An oversized brain, just enough larger than normal to be completely revolting and terrifying. A living brain. A brain that pulsed and quivered, that seized and commanded. No wonder the brain was called IT.” Mechanics of Writing... All the stuff that people usually concentrate on when teaching writing is really just the bottom level of challenges for a reader. How do I spell the word _____? Should there be a comma here? Which words of the title ________ should be capitalized? The reason that most teachers and parents concentrate on this part of writing is that it is easier to explain, check, test, and evaluate spelling and simple grammar than it is to explain how to write a funny essay, a suspenseful story, or a clearly organized paper. The research Gillespie and Graham describe did not deal with this particular writing challenge, but of course it is important to help kids learn these conventions – they are very helpful to the reader and therefore also to the writer! In conclusion, writing is challenging. For everybody! Even for “good” writers, even for professional writers, writing well is difficult. Teaching writing is therefore challenging as well. But we can help our kids climb onto the ever-spiraling staircase of more and more effective writing. Cathy Earle is an education writer who homeschooled her three daughters up to college. You can read what one of her daughters now writes about those experiences at The No-School Kids: A Homeschool Retrospec­tive , and you can find Cathy's free resource for kids at Every Day is Special.

Pam Sorooshian talks about the place of creative thinking in math and why so many people hate math so much. I loved math classes because there was right and wrong and no in between. The teacher told us how to do a certain math technique, we practiced a few (zillion) times, and reproduced it on a test. Happy face! 100 percent. I figured out something many of my fellow students didn’t seem to understand. Oh no, not the math - what I mean is I figured out that it didn’t matter if I understood it. All I had to do was replicate the procedure and I’d end up with a page full of correctly solved problems. Right, right, right, right, right... A great feeling (for a moment) for a kid who found life bewildering and who constantly worried about doing the right thing. It was mechanical and tedious, but I got great satisfaction from the certainty of a right answer. I wasn’t alone. Math teacher and author of The Case for Creativity in Math Education, Mark Lenergan, says, “As a teen, I could not figure out my life, but in this abstract world of math, I could resolve all my problems.” But, still, math is the most hated school subject. An AP-AOL News poll of 1,000 adults in the United States revealed that 37 percent recalled that they "hated" it. In the poll, more than twice as many people said they hated math as said they hated any other subject. Turns out that what I, Mark Lenergan, and probably most other math teachers found comforting about math class is exactly what many children find distressing, oppressive, and just plain awful - instructional methods that require students refrain from thinking for themselves and focus on following directions. Mindlessly. There is no room for creative thinking in math. Right? Even a mathematics curriculum that is touted as utilizing creative problem solving will nearly always offer problem solving opportunities only within narrow constraints and the students are expected to utilize the techniques they have been previously taught. But creativity requires open-endedness and the opportunity to come up with new ideas. It is, by nature, individualistic. It is misleading to call it creative problem solving if every student is expected to, in the end, come up with the same answer. Does it matter? Yes! It does matter unless you believe that the many children who can’t (or won’t) stifle their creative thinking brains in order to mechanically work through math problems just aren’t meant to do well in math. As homeschooling parents, we can duplicate the mistakes that schools make by using conventional teach, practice, and test instructional methods, or we can learn from their mistakes and do better. We can avoid the drill and kill approach in favor of encouraging open-ended exploration of mathematical ideas. If you are looking for math curriculum that will engage your child so that real learning takes place, consider creative problem-solving or project-based approaches described below. Unschoolers may also be interested in taking a look at the following as possible sources of fun things to do together as a family. Cambridge University has developed a website called NRICH which offers thought-provoking activities designed to encourage creative thinking. Another source of math exploration activities is the book Family Math by Jean Kerr Stenmark and Virginia Thompson. This book is aimed at kids ages 6 to 12 or so and there are also related books for young children and middle school levels. Last, but not least, are two great books by Marilyn Burns, Math for Smarty Pants and The I Hate Mathematics Book. All of these materials support creative thinking. Another approach is to engage with your child in projects in which mathematics is integrated into the process of designing, building, and creating something. Projects might be related to carpentry, technology, performance arts, visual arts, sports, social activities, or anything else that is of interest. For example, there are project-based math lesson plans available online which offers over 30 technology-based projects using Google Earth. Lack of creative thinking in mathematics can result in students who have memorized all the techniques, but cannot imagine where, how, or why to use them in real life. Creative thinking requires being willing to make mistakes. When mistakes are considered “wrong,” creativity is shut down. Remember, the point of this approach is to encourage exploration, not for children to march through a series of pre-determined steps. Enjoy the process together and let the learning happen along the way. Pam Sorooshian, mom of three grown-up homeschooled daughters is an economics and statistics college professor and runs a college theater box office in Southern California. She is active in unschooling discussions online, speaks at conferences, and previously served on the HSC Board of Directors.

Math Myth Number 1: Males are naturally better at math than females It is very easy to find evidence that seems to support this. For example, over the past 40 years, boys have consistently earned significantly higher math SAT scores and almost twice as many boys as girls continue to land in the 700 to 800 SAT score range (800 is perfect). And, in practical terms, females continue to hold only around 25% of science, technology, engineering, and math jobs in the United States, a rate that persists in spite of quite successful efforts in education to encourage girls to pursue math - more than half of students enrolled in AP/honors and advanced mathematics courses are females. It is no surprise that many conclude that the gender gap in math is natural and inevitable. Referring to University of Wisconsin professor Janet Hyde, Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute concludes: “Given the significant and persistent gender differences in SAT math test scores that have persisted over many generations, the scientific data about gender differences in math performance would seem to present a serious challenge to Professor Hyde’s claims that there are no gender differences in math performance.” That boys consistently outdistance girls on objective standardized math tests is true, but it is an extreme oversimplification to conclude that boys are naturally better at math than girls. First, there are no differences in math ability between young boys and girls; the differences appear and grow throughout adolescence. Also, based on those same standardized tests, boys are also worse at math than girls since a greater proportion of boys also earn the lowest scores. In addition, girls consistently score higher than boys on some of the subcategories of the math tests. Outside of the United States, girls often do as well or better than the boys of that country and girls in other countries do better than boys in the United States. In fact, a closer look at the international data supports the conclusion that math ability is not connected to the Y chromosome. Of course, any conclusions based entirely on standardized tests also ignore the fact that girls tend to outperform boys in classroom settings which may involve more practical and conceptual math than a standardized test. If the math gender gap is not natural and inevitable, the question is what causes it and, for homeschoolers, can we help our daughters avoid it. Some researchers have suggested that it is early childhood play that kickstarts the gender gap. Boys are encouraged to play with building materials such as Lego, which develops their spatial awareness. They are also more supported in large-muscle physical play which involves running, jumping, and climbing and, again, develops their senses of space, shape, angle, distance, speed, acceleration, and other concepts that later connect directly to mathematics. Others have pointed out that nearly all elementary school teachers are females who, themselves, suffer from a high degree of math anxiety and a belief that boys are better at math than girls. One study found that even though there was no relationship between teachers’ math anxiety and girls’ math ability or beliefs at the beginning of the year, by the end of the year, “...the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls (but not boys) were to endorse the common stereo- type that ‘boys are good at math,” and "girls are good at reading’ and the lower these girls’ math achievement.” As a homeschooling parent, what does the evidence mean to you? Whether you have boys or girls, try not to reinforce the stereottype. Homeschooling moms can avoid telling their kids to “ask your dad” whenever a math question comes up and, instead, try to help the child investigate the answer. Use Google, ask a friend (especially a female friend), and tackle it as you would other questions. You can also purposely avoid self-deprecating comments about being bad at math, not having a math brain, etc. Try to be aware that you might be avoiding math. Look for math-related picture books, for example, to enjoy with your young children. Show enthusiasm if your daughter is interested in building materials such as Lego and other typical boy activities. Get involved and support the interest. Allow your daughter to do physical activities and take some risks. When your daughter wants to climb a tree or skateboard on a ramp, ask yourself if you’re being over-cautious because she’s female. One of the best ways to encourage future mathematical success is playing games, so encourage lots of game playing of all kinds and especially board games, dice games, card games, and paper and pencil games. Most of all, be aware of your own attitude toward math and make efforts to show confidence in your child’s ability. Math myths are pervasive in our society but you can choose not to invite them into your home. Pam Sorooshian, mom of three grown-up homeschooled daughters, is an economics and statistics college professor in Southern California. She is active in homeschooling discussions online, speaks at conferences and previously served on the HSC Board of Directors. 

The most important thing for homeschooling parents to know about math is not how to divide fractions or use the quadratic formula - it is that math difficulties have emotional roots. In his research, Dr. Joseph Warren, author of the book Mind Over Math, found that people learn math more quickly if they also discuss their feelings about it. But what do feelings have to do with math? If you regularly talk about math (like I do), you’ll hear a whole lot of feelings expressed - mostly moans and groans. People frequently say they hate it, it stresses them out or it makes them feel stupid. Homeschooling parents often report worrying about teaching math to their children. In fact, there is so much math anxiety out there that long-time math educator Marilyn Burns calls it “national phobia.” What is a homeschooling parent to do? Remembering that math difficulties have emotional roots, the question is how to avoid planting the seeds that eventually grow into negative math experiences and emotional blockages. Homeschooling parents often engage in an endless search for the perfect math curriculum, hoping to stumble upon the perfect program for their child. In the meantime, children grow up in a math-phobic society, and many a child throws down his or her pencil in frustration and groans (or yells), “I hate math!" But why? Why is such a seemingly non-emotional subject actually so fraught with emotions? What IS it about math? And is there a solution? Unfortunately, there is no single solution. Yes, there are better and worse math programs, but that perfect curriculum not only does not exist, it will never be developed. That is because, no matter what math program you use (if any), there are beliefs and practices common in our society that work against you being able to instill “math comfort” in your child instead of math anxiety. Fortunately, awareness of these damaging beliefs and practices will allow you to avoid them as much as possible. I will be addressing solutions to many of these practices and beliefs in future columns, but the most damaging belief is the one that says, “math is harder than other subjects, and only a few people can be good at it.” This is exactly what most students learn and what most parents believe. In fact, if there was a truth-in-advertising law for schools, one of their ads would read, “We offer a no-cost guarantee that your children will end up feeling inadequate and stupid and convinced that they don’t have a math brain!” Don’t take your kids out of school to avoid school damage and then do the same damage at home. But does your child really have a math brain? There are mathematical prodigies - children whose brains are wired such that parents find themselves more concerned with how to feed their mathematical interest than with it being crushed. Those are the young Mozarts of math. But the existence of a Mozart doesn’t mean the rest of us are musically (or mathematically) stupid and shouldn’t enjoy or develop competency in it. The math we’re talking about is not harder than speaking a language, reading, writing, or even playing soccer or piano, painting or most of the other things our children learn. We make it difficult! We teach abstract material too soon to children still operating in concrete developmental stages. We break that material down into too-small pieces that offer no sense of context or usefulness. Math classes or programs move too quickly and do not allow time for full understanding. We use methods that promote memorization of algorithms over problem solving and emphasize right answers over investigation. We teach that there is just one right way to solve any problem, assign primarily out-of-context drills and assess knowledge of mechanics but not understanding. Children are naturally curious about numbers, measurements and patterns, and they happily enjoy exploring them outside of formal education. Frank Smith, author of The Book of Learning and Forgetting, points out the important role both positive and negative emotions play in learning when he says: “Children are not empty vessels into which teachers pour selected skills and nuggets of knowledge. Rather, it is in the child’s nature to express and develop innate intellectual capacities, integrating all experiences...that includes hopes and fears, loves and hates, beliefs and, and attitudes towards other people and towards himself.” What are your feelings toward math? Pam Sorooshian, mom of three grown-up homeschooled daughters, is an economics and statistics college professor in Southern California. She is active in homeschooling discussions online, speaks at conferences and has previously served on the Homeschool Association of California Board of Directors.

It is the end of a long day of fun and learning. Dinnertime has come and gone. Baths have been taken. This is one of the sweetest times of your homeschooling day. You pick some of your favorite read-aloud books and call the kids to come and cuddle up. Time to do some math. Wait, what? Math? Now? At bedtime? Did you just cringe? Enjoying literature together is a wonderful way to introduce children to all kinds of mathematical concepts from counting to Cartesian coordinates. Starting with beautifully illustrated and interesting counting books, you can move on to some really fun books that involve adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, remainders, fractions, very large numbers, geometry, money, measurement, probability, graphing, and more. And not only can children pick up actual mathematical knowledge through exposure to it in a natural way and in a context that makes sense, but literature can also set the stage for children to engage with math in the future with the kind of positive and confident attitude which is key to successful learning while avoiding math anxiety or phobia. Young children love to count, and many people enjoy counting books with their toddlers. There are too many great counting books to list them all. Many introduce sorting, grouping, categorizing, and matching. Some of my favorites are: 1, 2, 3 to the Zoo by Eric Carle Seven Blind Mice by Ed Young Ten in the Bed by Anne Geddes 12 Ways to Get to 11 by Eve Merriam Fish Eyes: A Book You Can Count On by Lois Ehlert Ten Hungry Rabbits by Anita Lobel If you browse your local library or bookstore shelves or search for “counting books” on Amazon, you’ll discover many fabulous counting books about almost any topic you can imagine from construction machinery to dinosaurs to hugs from daddy. You can also introduce and explore many arithmetic concepts through children’s literature. For example, one of the best simple addition books for young children is One More Bunny: Adding from One to Ten by Rick Walton. Ten Sly Piranhas by William Wise and Victoria Chess will have you giggling while doing subtraction. The King’s Commissioners by Aileen Friedman is great fun and all about grouping and multiplication while One Hundred Angry Ants by Elinor Pinczes offers a clear visual look at division. Another great division book is A Remainder of One which is also by Elinor Pinczes. A couple of great fraction books are Eating Fractions by Bruce McMillan and Lion’s Share A Tale of Halving Cake and Eating It Too by Matthew McElliogott. Money and economics are the topics of the hilarious Pigs Will Be Pigs by Amy Axelrod and Alexander, Who Used to be Rich Last Sunday by the wonderful writer Judith Viorst. And last but not least there is a wonderful little book that tells how Rene Descartes invented the Cartesian coordinates graphing system: A Fly on the Ceiling by Julie Glass. Some other books that offer lots of math along with being great read-alouds for younger and older kids are: The Cat in Numberland by Ivar Ekeland and John O’Brien; The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat by Theoni Pappas; and The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Susanne Rotraut. There are many more great reads for older kids, too. Some of the best are the wonderful Murderous Math series of books by Kjartan Poskitt. Other kids might enjoy biographies of mathematicians in Mathematicians are People, Too by Luetta Reimer and Wilbert Reimer, or even Mathematical Scandals . Archimedes and the Door of Science by Jeanne Bendeck describes Archimedes’ mathematical and scientific accomplishments in a captivating story format. There are many more books that contain math. If you keep an eye out, you’ll find enough of them at your local library or bookstore to give you lots and lots of opportunities to “read math.” -Pam Sorooshian, mom of three grown-up homeschooled daughters, is an economics and statistics college professor in Southern California. She is active in homeschooling discussions online, speaks at conferences and previously served on the Homeschool Association of California Board of Directors.

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If parents can examine and work through their own anxiety related to math and recognize it’s source, they can get over it at least enough to not pass it on to their children. It very likely can be traced back to a particular incident that happened to you in school. Did you miss school because of chicken pox and come back to discover the class had moved on without you? Did you feel lost and confused and just never could catch up? Was there a subject that confused you and you always felt “dumb in math” after that? The culprit is most often either fractions or algebra. Very possibly you really do not want to even think about your own feelings about math. Avoidance is the most common result of math anxiety. You may think you aren’t even math-anxious, but math just never really comes up in your life. Those are the thoughts of a math-anxious person, though. Math is everywhere and there is no chance at all that you’re not living a life immersed in mathematics. You may not want to see it, because you associate it with shame, fear, and misery, but you are living in a mathematical world. An example of mathematical thinking that you almost certainly engage in on a regular basis: You’re at the grocery store, cart loaded, and you’re ready to check out. What do you do? You eyeball the lines at each check stand, noting how many people are in each of the lines. You also note how full each of their carts is. You notice that some check stands have baggers helping out while others don’t. You might even notice the rate of speed the checkers seem to be working. You quickly take in all that (mathematical) information, estimate the effects of all those variables in your head, and choose the line you think will move the fastest. This is not just mathematics; this is sophisticated and complex mathematics that includes solving systems of simultaneous equations and incorporating probability-of-error estimates. Yet you do it almost effortlessly. So, I hope you realize by now that you’re clearly a math genius. (As long as we don’t put it all down on paper, right?) Seriously, you HAVE a “math brain.” I could give you many other examples of how you do higher-order mathematical thinking all the time in your daily life. The fact that you doubt your own math ability, that you think of yourself as “not good in math,” is a result of what was done to you in the name of teaching. You should be royally pissed off that it was done to you, but what’s the point of stewing in those juices now? You’re a parent and your children need you to move on! You can do it. How to Get over Math Anxiety as a parent Share your experiences. Start with thinking hard and maybe writing/blogging/talking to someone else about your own school-math experiences. Sharing these experiences with others very very often releases us from the old emotions, the fears, the shame, the self-doubts, that we’ve buried for years. Turns out you were NOT the only one feeling this way and turns out it wasn’t your fault at all, it was the teaching methods! They messed with you! So – share and express and that’ll help you recover. You’ll still have a lot of negativity associated with math, it might not turn you into a math-lover, but letting go of the old baggage will free you for the next step. Enjoy math with, for, and through your children. Yes, you get a second chance. Don’t let on to them that you’re anxious about it. Act like anything involving numbers, measurement, patterns, or anything else “math-like,” is just about the most fun and interesting thing you can imagine. Relax into math. Many parents with a bit (or a lot) of math anxiety don’t even realize how they stiffen up and withdraw when their children innocently draw their attention to something math-related. Make a conscious effort to do the opposite. Smile warmly when your child asks a question that just might involve some math. Touch, hug, cuddle! Read math-related stories for fun, just like you read any other stories. There are lots of them, but you just might be avoiding them (maybe not even noticing as your eyes skim past any book that looks like it might contain some math). Play a lot of games. Don’t say, “I don’t like games,” because that is very likely your math anxiety talking. There are lots of different kinds of games and saying, “I don’t like games” is a bit like saying, “I don’t like music.” Seriously? You don’t like any of it? Games are, by nature, fun. The point is to have a good time. So they are very conducive to experiencing some math in a friendly, warm, happy atmosphere. This is good for YOU (well, for your kids, too, but they aren’t the ones with the problem). Use a little self-discipline. Recognize your own urge to avoid math and replace it with a conscious decision to have some fun with it, instead. You might need to work on being aware of the math that is everywhere, for a while (don’t point it out to the kids). This is part of your recovery and eventually you won’t need to think of math as a separate thing, it will just be part of the world, interconnected with everything else. Again, I want to repeat that it seems to REALLY help people to share the stories of their own negative math experiences. If you’d like to share yours in the comments to this post, you’re welcome to do so. Pam Sorooshian, mom of three grown-up homeschooled daughters is an economics and statistics college professor and runs a college theater box office in Southern California. She is active in unschooling discussions online, speaks at conferences, and has served on the HSC Board of Directors.

When delving into research on how kids learn to read, of course I wanted to discover what research has actually found, rather than choosing research findings that confirm my fondest notions while ignoring anything I don’t want to believe. However, that proved to be tricky. Early Intervention vs. Readiness: Two Sides of the Reading Coin For one thing, study after study has found that kids who are “behind” in reading in Kindergarten and Grade 1 fall farther and farther behind their fellow students as they get older. The authors of these studies urge early identification of reading problems and learning disabilities as well as early intervention to solve problems, accommodate disabilities, and catch them up. However, psychologist and author Peter Gray points out that it is only important that kids learn to read “on schedule” if those kids attend traditional school. As we know, most assignments in and assessments for every subject – not just “Reading” – depend on reading. Peter Gray goes on to explain, in his article Children Teach Themselves to Read, that kids who do not attend traditional schools – kids who attend Sudbury-style schools, unschool, or homeschool with flexible and individualized curriculum – can learn to read much later without any ill effects. These non-traditional students often learn science and math and history through DOING things – doing science experiments, exploring nature, playing games, programming robots, participating in living history events, touring everything from old forts to modern courthouses, and much more. Many un-/homeschooling families enjoy read-aloud sessions even when kids are older. Assessments are often minimized or delayed, and bubble-in tests are often replaced by portfolios or oral assessments. Gray points out that, without the pressure of text-heavy school instruction from an early age, children are free to learn to read when they themselves are actually ready, and when they see a need for it. The age at which this happens varies widely from child to child, ranging from ages 3 to 13; yet assessment of these kids at age 15 shows almost no difference between kids who learned to read “early” and those who learned “late.” I DON’T want to believe the “three pivotal longitudinal studies” that the American Federation of Teachers used to show that waiting for kids’ readiness “rarely works: late bloomers usually just wilt.” I DO want to believe Peter Gray’s much smaller study of unschooled students. And even while admitting this bias, I would argue that Gray is right: it is the structure of school itself that makes problems for kids who are out of synch with the curriculum, and it is the traditional educational practices that create reading problems and learning “disabilities” where, in many cases, there is just variance in readiness. The take-away: ➢ Make sure there are many and varied sources of print in our kids’ environments. ➢ Read aloud to your kids. ➢ Look for signs of readiness and respond to interest in independent reading. ➢ Support kids’ efforts once they embark on learning to read. What else does research tell us about reading instruction? According to Cambridge researcher David Whitebread, all children benefit from more play and exploration time before their formal education begins. He suggests not starting ​formal education and literacy lessons until age 7. The take-away: ➢ Let kids play and explore while they are young. ➢ Don’t begin curricula and textbooks until age 7 or older. ➢ If children spontaneously read before age 7, allow them to read as much as they like, but don’t launch into formal lessons. One-Size-Fits-All Reading Instruction Doesn't Exist According to multiple articles and research studies, there is no one reading instruction program or technique that “works” for every child. Some children respond better to phonics instruction, and others to “whole word” instruction; most kids do well with a mixed approach. Gray points out that many children teach themselves to read without any instruction at all, and that they often go very quickly from (seemingly) non-readers to fluent readers. This rapid transition can seem mysterious, but a lot of learning has been going on “behind the scenes.” It’s worth noting that some kids don’t “magically” learn to read on their own and do need help and support. The take-away: ➢ Don’t splurge hundreds of dollars on a particular program that promises results with every child. ➢ Don’t hold so firmly onto any preconceived notion that you cannot respond to the particular needs of your child. ➢ Once your child demonstrates readiness for and excitement about reading, be ready to use a variety of materials and methods to help them learn. The Working Memory Connection According to Susan Gathercole and Tracy Alloway, about 70% of kids who experience difficulty learning to read have working memory problems. With a smaller mental workspace in which they can hold information while processing it, they have difficulty remembering the gist of what they are reading while they are sounding out the next word. The take-away: ➢ If your child seems to lose track of the sense of a story, check out Gathercole and Alloway’s Understanding Working Memory. Character Development Matters in Fiction Character-driven fiction helps people learn social skills and empathy, whereas plot-driven fiction and nonfiction don’t have similar results. The take-away: ➢ Be sure to include some literature with rich, complex characters as you read aloud to your children. ➢ Encourage informal discussions on what the characters are thinking and feeling, their motivations and goals. ➢ Include literary fiction and nonfiction on your shelves and library orders. Pushing Kids to Read Can Be Counterproductive Attempts to push reading with kids who are not ready can backfire. The school system has been providing generations of proof that pushing can have disastrous results, but Gray’s study confirms that similar negative results can occur with parental pushing. The take-away: ➢ Look for signs of readiness: knowing the alphabet, enjoyment of looking at books and magazines, pretending to read, and the ability to repeat sentences of seven or eight words. ➢ Once you detect readiness, offer to help your child learn to read independently, but be ready to back off and try again later if your child seems unwilling or confused. Teaching Kids to Find, Analyze, and Use Information Penelope Trunk points out that today’s kids don’t need to memorize as much as students in the past did, but they do need to become great at searching for information and handling high volumes of information. She suggests teaching older kids to scan material so that they know what is available and where to find info if and when they need it. (I would add that kids also need critical reading skills, including analyzing and checking multiple sources.) The take-away: ➢ Think about the very different reading skills that are required by our hyper-connected world.

Both of my daughters crossed that magical line into reading “fluency” at around the same time – each in the second half of their 2nd grade year. I know there were YEARS of build up, but still, it seemed to happen overnight. Like magic. Their individual journeys to get there were vastly different, but after partnering, guiding, facilitating, and then just plain old staying out of the way, I felt pretty confident that my youngest, a boy, would find his own way, too, in his own time. And yet... He didn’t seem to be as interested in the whole reading thing. Being read to, yes! But not reading for himself. Being six and not interested didn’t bother me. Not a bit. Being seven and not interested didn’t bother me. Not really. Being eight and not interested didn’t...wait, that started to bother me. So I tried a little bit of extra “nudging”. Nudging that was not well received by my son. I’m a big fan of a well-placed, gentle nudge, but it should be noted that continuing to offer unwelcome nudging is nudging no longer. It becomes pushing. I knew better, and yet here I was – pushing. So I backed off. Well, let’s be honest here. I backed off after I went ahead and made a mess of things. But I backed off. I took a deep breath and continued on – continued to read to him, answer his questions about what things said in his video games and on television, birthday cards, signs, and books he would look through. When I read aloud to him before bed I would still offer to read with him if he wanted. And then were times when I didn’t offer, that he asked. A book that seemed to click for him, that prompted him to ask more nights than not to read to me, was The Children’s Story Bible. It was at this point in the whole process that this eight-year-old of mine informed me that he reads all the time during the day. All the time. Really? The schoolish part of me (a very teeny tiny part, but still there to rear her disdainful head from time to time) clucked her tongue and said, “I don’t see any of that going on, and if I don’t see it and hear it and measure it, then it didn’t happen. And besides, ​whatever it is he’s doing is NOT the same thing as sitting down with me and practicing reading.” I promptly slapped the schoolish part of me. Hard. She didn’t even see it coming. And then I listened to my young son as he matter-of-factly told me how he reads everywhere we go. How when nobody is watching him or asking him questions, he reads signs. Street signs, signs in restaurants, at the library, businesses we drive by and stop in...signs EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME. I smiled and told him how awesome that was, and that one day soon he’d be able to read anything and everything without even having to try. He just would, like his older sisters. He was still a tad doubtful. After that conversation, I began to pay a bit more attention. I discreetly watched him at moments throughout the day. Watched how observant he was, noticed the times where he stood looking at a sign or a cereal box, sometimes mouthing the words to himself. The unschooler in me went ahead and called forth that schoolish part (the part I’d slapped with relish into a dark, isolated corner). “See? Do you see that? That’s how it happens. Shame on you for making me doubt, for making me not see the full value and beauty in that.” My son is nine now and will be a 4th grader. He enjoys reading shorter books with lots of pictures or illustrations thrown in here and there. As his skills grow, so does his confidence in himself. The lure of food coupons and cheap toys through our local library’s summer reading program has prompted yet another burst in his reading fluency. So now at night before I read to him, he’ll lie there reading a Mr. Putter and Tabby book. I just sit there with him, keeping him company, waiting for my turn to read to him. Sometimes he reads out loud to me. Other times he reads silently to himself, occasionally turning the book around and pointing to a word he can’t figure out. The schoolish part of me would have made him sound it out or figure it out for himself. But now I simply answer my son’s questions.

Develop your child's reading skills at their own pace! Explore the magic of books, songs, poems & conversation for a joyful learning experience.

Archie Andrews taught my kids to read. And now he’s gonna die! Not because he taught my kids to read, but because in the series Life With Archie, the red headed teenage comic book icon takes a bullet for a friend. But all is not lost, I’d quickly relayed to the girls, the regular teenage Archie is still very much alive and kicking. I hadn’t wanted a comic book series to be the vehicle through which my homeschooled girls were compelled to read. Books were all over the house, but there were certain favorites, and they demanded that they be read over and over. Eventually I instituted a rule: if I don’t like reading a book, I’m not going to read it aloud. My thought was that I could avoid the mind-numbing monotony of some books and direct the girls to literature of high quality. This rule worked, for a time. Then the period arrived when our girls seemed to struggle to read on their own, and I was forced to drop all pretense of my former snobby ways. Our older daughter, the more visual learner, found an old, dog-eared, French language Archie comic while we were on holiday in Quebec. The colorful pictures attracted her attention, and she was keenly interested to find out what these characters were saying in those bubbles over their heads. She studied that comic for so long that I gave in and bought an English one I found at a second-hand store for a dime. Around this time, at age 7, she was resisting my attempts to encourage her to read on her own. We had followed a reading program I liked, and she had completed it successfully. However, she didn’t transfer what she had learned in the program to a book of her own choosing. Although she could read up to two large print pages from the resource, she struggled to open any random book and read it. One day she asked me, “Mom, what does 'bats in the belfry' mean?” “Where did you hear that expression?” I asked her. “I read it in the Archie comic,” she replied. I was stunned. Despite my delivery of resource-based reading instruction and all those years of quality-only literature in the house, my daughter was learning to read from Archie comics. I lost any sense of pride right then and there, and prowled the second-hand stores for old copies of Archie and Jughead comics. The stack resided beside her bed for months, and she went through them until she pleaded for ​newer ones. The old ones were passed on to her younger sister who learned to read from them as well. And, from the Archie comics, the transition to other reading material occurred. At first, I reluctantly accepted the Archie comics method of reading instruction as a necessary evil to encourage them to read on their own. However, my daughter opened my mind to the quality lurking in the Archie comics. First, as Canadians, we were impressed to find that the Archie comics, as American publications, once devoted an entire issue to Canadian geography, culture, language, and politics. This same daughter also pointed out to me, “Look, they use 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.” I began to change my mind about the whole deal. The clincher for me occurred on another vacation in Quebec. We’d spent two summers there so that the girls could learn some French. Naturally, a stack of Archie comics came on vacation with us, including the original French-language issue, now taped together in several places. Their language skills were really coming along after spending a few weeks at a francophone day camp. One night, I lay between the girls on the large bed to read bedtime stories, a habit we continued even while on vacation. I insisted we read at least one French book before defaulting to their favorites in English, and out came the French Archie comic. I went through the stories reading bubble after bubble aloud in French, but came upon a phrase with some vocabulary I was struggling with. “Hmmm, I’m not sure what is happening here,” I admitted. “Archie must have a squirrel living in the engine of his car because look,” my daughter said, pointing to the pictures of acorns in the air filter. The visual clues cleared it up for us, and we continued with the story. That night in Quebec, I realized that Archie was becoming the vehicle by which our daughters were also learning to read in French. I bet there are parents out there, whose children devour comics, who agree that reading is reading. No point in looking down our noses at the material. Archie had accomplished in two languages what all of my reading instruction resources could not do in one. - Janet LoSole and her husband of 20 years, Lloyd Stringer, use the communities of the world to homeschool their two girls, who, when they are not traveling, read books and sing show tunes.

One of the countless surprises of our homeschooling journey has been that with a 23-year-old and an 18-year-old, I am still driving them around. At first, I imagined it was a side effect of homeschooling that might be holding them back, somehow limiting their possibilities. I worried about how to get them “going” and stay on schedule with their peers, and how they would “keep up” and not literally get “left behind.” They still haven’t shown much interest in driving themselves, in taking the class and passing the test that will get them where they want to go. But apparently, times have changed - it turns out that getting a license isn’t so standard for today’s teens, homeschooled or not: The majority of American teens today delay getting a driver’s license, according to new study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Less than half (44 percent) of teens obtain a driver’s license within 12 months of the minimum age for licensing in their state. . . a significant drop from two decades ago when data showed more than two-thirds of teens were licensed by the time they turned 18. So almost six in ten teens shrug and say they can get around without it. Is that change a good thing, for them and for society? Or is it reason for parental and societal concern when this generation begins to learn it doesn’t really need our old rules, standards and credentials to get where they want to go? And isn’t that question much bigger than we imagined when we started driving ourselves, much less driving kids? My parent worries were born right along with my babies and have grown with them, from sleeping, eating and toileting on schedule to school grades, graduating and standards in every possible area and skill level. It isn’t always easy to hear complaints and misunderstandings about the Common Core, new standards meant to increase criti- cal thinking and problem-solving skills in the nation’s 100,000 public elementary and secondary schools... It should come as no surprise for a major sea change in education to meet both criticism and cheers. (Liz Wil- len, The Hechinger Report, Nov 2013) If the Common Core standards and Race to the Top are the latest models for driving our kids around the road-of-life training course, “on schedule” and “by-the-rulebook,” homeschoolers are free to go round and round. It really IS our choice. So what if we increased our critical thinking and problem-solving skills about whether testing, standards and racing to the top get our own families where we want to go, and if so, how? Like today’s not-so-driven-to-drive teens, more and more families are finding different learning destinations and other ways to get there apart from drive or be driven. No one had to bribe or coerce me to learn to drive. I earned my learner’s permit the day I turned 15 -- same at 16 for the much- coveted license. I couldn’t wait to sit in the driver’s seat and take the wheel of my own life. It was, at that age, even more important than SATs or graduation. It was the road to freedom, autonomy and mobility, both a “rite” and “right” of passage. Whether we aced the test or squeaked by after trying and failing, with a driver’s license we could get where we wanted to go. (There was a time when a high school diploma was similarly valued.) Driving wasn’t a competition for a limited number of elite spots on the road; rather, it was a mastery standard many of us wanted to meet, and did so with modest effort and no special aptitude. We helped each other study the handbook and practice parallel parking. Once licensed, we drove our younger friends so no one was left behind. squo;s seat a little longer before we returned to our regular back seats. Remember, homeschooling is much big- ger than driving, so let’s take the metaphor further and see where it goes. Can you race to the top if you’re not all headed up the same mountain to the same finish line? You can’t win if you don’t enter, but can you LOSE a race you never entered? Suppose everyone starts out on the same mountain, wanting to race to the top, to get there faster than everyone else on the journey. Does it matter if some are on foot, bicycles or using public transportation? Does it matter if some are sponsored while others preserve their amateur status? But suppose everyone does start out and stay behind the wheel. Doesn’t it still matter what shape each vehicle is in, how full the tank is and whether every racer has a talented pit crew to keep them rolling? What if race organizers set traps along the route or added unaffordable tollbooths so that most racers were forces out before "getting there?" Is the point just to “get there” somehow, and eventually all wind up there together at the same place? Or is the point to get there FIRST and leave others behind? How do you win the race to get there when where you want to go isn’t really a race, or a place, at all? Perhaps getting where you want to go depends on wanting to go there in the first place. -The News & You JJ Ross, Ed.D. , connect everything to everything else. She spent half of her six decades in public schooling, the other at home with kids, and the main thing she has learned in all that time is that the ones who need to be learning new stuff every day aren’t so much the kids in school – it’s the rest of us!

What naturalist John Muir noted more than a century ago, today’s homeschoolers can see for themselves and come to trust as immutable truth. Parenting connects to play... and play connects to learning... and learning connects to life..amen It was easy and natural for us to play with our firstborn as a baby and toddler without wanting to “teach” her. In my mind that precious time was “pre-school” so it was guilt-free playtime for us all! But because my mind was full of formal education about formal education, I had a harder time later in coming to trust play for connecting kids to just about anything at any age. One thing that helped was that both kids became musical theatre geeks, literally playing with plays. The learning connections were so strong and clear that the formal schooling voice inside my own head sang and danced and happily played along. But as my firstborn approached high school age, my inner teacher started scolding me for playing when there was serious business at hand. It meant that I really had to work at it, filling my bookshelves and poring over journal articles before I could keep trusting play as directly connected to learning. I found a scholarly review of Real Kids: Creating Meaning in Everyday Life, a Harvard University Press book in which (teacher and parent turned psychologist) Susan L. Engel “argues that children’s play and storytelling provide clear evidence that children’s thinking is not a simplified version of adult thinking, but rather reflects a qualitatively different way of interacting with the world — a way of interacting in which the boundaries between fantasy and reality are highly permeable.” I found Psychology Today articles, including Peter Gray’s work on play connections: “Play makes children nimble—neurobiologically, mentally, behaviorally—capable of adapting to rapidly evolving world. That makes it just about the best preparation for life in the 21st century... Think of play as the future with sneakers on.” Mac co-inventor Paul Graham isn’t a psychologist but his connections helped me learn about serious play, too: “By the time they reach an age to think about what they’d like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one’s work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty.”  Did you know the word “Lego” is a creative fusion of the Danish words leg and godt, which literally means “play well” but can also be interpreted to mean“I gather together” in Latin, and “I connect” in Italian? Translation: playing well and connecting share meaning in any language! I personally love Legos and we’ve got whole bins full. (If your kids are old enough not to swallow them, you probably do, too, or will have before you know it.) They literally embody play that creates and sustains connections. Legos help transform the factual into the imaginary, can make the imaginary downright fantastical, and in the best play, can create whole new worlds. When Lego turned 50 and was rewarded with its very own Google Doodle for the day, the logo’s letters built entirely of these bright little play connections, the New York Times business section did a long feature that I read aloud with my teenage son. He naturally connected the somewhat ponderous business writing back this own play: “The video games they’ve made so far — the two Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Batman— have been just ingenious at skewering the movies! All the cut scenes and even some of the gameplay do a great job of mimicking and yet mocking the movie. . .The thing I’ve always enjoyed is to see how they build the figures because face it, who wouldn’t find the Lego Sean Connery hilarious??” [He shows me the figure — he’s right. It’s adorable.] Then he adds he’d like to see a Lego Lone Ranger tie-in. Which would be great because there’s no gun violence problem as discussed in the article, since the Lone Ranger never shoots to kill. He begins strolling around, performing the Lone Ranger theme instrumentation at the top of his lungs. Ten minutes later he comes out of his room with an incredibly credible Lone Ranger, gloves and black mask, mounted on a silver white horse . . . Days like that made it easy to see the power of play connecting to everything. The New York Times shared more formally in "Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?" “. . .a simple but surprising idea: that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call ‘mature dramatic play’: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours,even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to . . .spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend...maybe what we all need to do is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play.” Our parenting play with the kids was almost always story play of some sort – movies, books, television, musical theatre characters and video games all connecting to the same or similar characters and themes. Thus our humor and fun as a family was centered on knowing and following myriad story scripts, staying in character with whatever roles we were playing out, from the time Dad would be Eeyore or a Wild Thing and the child would be Christopher Robin or Pooh or Max, to throwing Les Miz and Sondheim dialogue and songs back and forth as we do now with two teens. So looking back at how I made my own connections between play and learning, teaching myself to not teach my children wasn’t work and it wasn’t school. More by happy accident than design I had kept myself busy long enough working through scholarly stuff on play, that it (mostly) kept me from inflicting scholarly stuff on the kids. In the process, I collected bins full of colorful connections to play well with, just like Legos themselves. Could we say that in the end, I taught myself to let go and Lego? - JJ Ross, Ed.D. , connect everything to everything else. She spent half of her six decades in public schooling, the other at home with kids, and the main thing she has learned in all that time is that the ones who need to be learning new stuff every day aren’t so much the kids in school – it’s the rest of us!

I find that when children are happy and having fun, they are in a prime position to learn. Emotion is the gatekeeper to learning. Making learning fun ensures increased interest in a topic and the information becomes more memorable. Let me share an experience with you. There was a time when I needed to put my older children in school. They were placed in the same classroom. When I picked them up after their first day, I was excited to hear from them how the day went. They told me that the teacher said she would be nice and she would not give them homework on the first day. This was an unfortunate take-away from their first day of school: schoolwork is bad, avoid it if you can. I was so disappointed. This was opposite of the fun learning we’d been having at home! Yet how often do we get stuck in the “I hate schoolwork” trap? Do our children enjoy their day-to-day learning? I believe that it is not only possible to have fun learning experiences every day, but that they SHOULD have fun learning experiences every day. When children are having fun, they are in a relaxed and alert state and their brains are wide open, ready to learn. Here are some fun ways to introduce great topics to your child. Use themes What are your children interested in? Most if not all of your learning experiences can be influenced by the theme. When new information is juxtaposed with things they already love - such as a favorite topic, a theme park or popular computer game - their interest is heightened. I like to start by decorating our learning environment to match the theme. It’s so fun! Get out! Children love adventures and to see new things. Each new thing they en- counter is something they can learn from. Some great places to go: • libraries • a variety of field trips • hiking • theme parks • park day with friends • road trips Start a co-op Some children love to go to “class” with friends. This class time should not be spent sitting at desks, listening to lectures or completing worksheets. These classes can be dynamic activities that en- courage collaboration among peers. Invite your friends over for some fun learning activities such as cooking, building, challenges and hunts! Once curiosity is sparked, who knows where it’ll lead? You will hear your child say things like, “Let me try! Can I do it? Show me! Tell me! Let me do it!” This is when you know they are ready to move on to the second part of the process, which is playing with the topic. Let them choose how they will play with the information. They may explore the topic on their own and within their own intelligences and learning styles. Will they spend a couple hours Googling it? Will they make posters? Write plays? Can you think of some ways your child would enjoy playing? Allow them to delve into the topic. REC Time! This is when you can provide REC time for your children. This means you can allow them to: Read. What books are they drawn to? ​Exercise. The brain works better when the body is fit. Children like to move, and a moving child learns faster than one who sits still. Create. Keep a variety of materials and resources available for your child to create. Aside from the collaborative projects with others, it is also important for a child to have time to create on their own. Be sure to allow for lots of time for your child to do these projects. Your child may appreciate suggestions for projects. Children love exploring and learning like this. When learning and fun are synonymous, students come to really love learning – even the hard stuff! When the artist Michelangelo was 15 and working on a sculpture, he was invited by a friend to go on a hunt. Michelangelo turned down the opportunity. After being chided by his friend, he said, “For me, marble has the excitement of the hunt.” Because of his deep interest in sculpture, Michelangelo would rather work than play. The same thing can happen with learning. With true interest in a topic, a child may have the opportunity to enjoy the excitement of the hunt themselves. What can they discover, uncover, create and find? Don’t worry about making sure that all recommended topics are “covered.” Information shared with a bored student is time wasted. But when a child is properly engaged, and the learning is fun, they will remember these experiences, along with the accompanying information. When your child is moving, touching and breathing their learning experiences, don’t be too surprised to find your child jumping up and down about their schoolwork (I’ve seen this happen)! Don’t be surprised when these interests expand into other interests. Don’t be surprised when they become insatiable learners. As Frederick Nietzsche said, “Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of a noble education. Dancing with the feet, the mind and ideas.”  Enjoy the adventures you will have, and don’t forget the fun! -Heather Martinson was introduced to homeschooling by her mother in the 1980s. Heather's four children, ages 25, 23, 16 and 12 were almost exclusively homeschooled. In 2006 Heather started Celebration with the premise that learning should be fun. Celebration Education now offers fun learner-centered classes in a variety of locations including parks, rented facilities, homes, theme parks (including Disneyland), and now Minecraft!

One of the most frequent question I hear is, “What does a typical day look like in your house?” It’s hard to know how to answer since what we are doing is what we have always done. We live our life, have fun, try new things, talk about them. Mostly, the learning happens almost “under the radar” – people talking, laughing, doing stuff, watching things, tasting things, and making connections that make sense to them. Occasionally, like spotting an insect in the grass, I “catch it” while it’s happening and I try to document it on Facebook. It pays to keep your eyes open. Recently, we were at our local Farmer’s Market where they have, among all the stands for different farms, an Amish butcher shop. While we were there, Gabriella, 10, and Harry, 8, both found pennies on the ground. On the car ride home the kids took a very close look at their finds. Gabriella asked if Abraham Lincoln was always on the penny, and I was able to share that I have some pennies from the 1860s with an American Indian on the coins.  Then we talked about the phrase “In God We Trust,” and how with money there has to be a kind of “leap of faith” about its worth as it is made of only bits of metal and pieces of paper. This led to a discussion of the gold standard, and why some people think we should return to that. The kids wondered what would happen if we “changed the rules of money in the middle of the game?” Would there be enough gold to go around? We then talked about how some countries use US dollars as their currency since US currency is considered more stable than their own money. We also talked about where money is made, and I wondered aloud if it’s still possible to tour a mint. I remember taking a tour of the Philadelphia Mint in the early 1980s. Then Harry noticed that the two pennies were exactly 40 years apart...All of this for two cents. We got way more than two cents worth out of that discussion! Now THAT’s value!!! After I got home, I wrote up what happened and posted it on FB, receiving a lot of “likes” and comments. One from a non-homeschooling friend jumped out at me: Wow! That was certainly worth more than two cents. I probably would have said, “see a penny, pick it up, and all the day you will have good luck”, and left it at that. Ha ha ha. The reason that jumped out at me is that I have also said that exact rhyme to my kids when they find pennies on the floor. I must have said it 50 times in the past. But this time I didn’t. Recently, I had been thinking that I don’t want my kids to feel like they’ve already heard everything I’ve ever had to say before. I want to be and continue to be an interesting resource for them. Not long ago, the kids were playing Minecraft together, and Gabriella said to Harry, with regard to something in the game, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” To which Harry replied, “Probably not, since you are completely unpredictable!” I don’t want to be so unpredictable that they feel unsafe, but not so predictable that they tune me out, either. So when the kids found money, all I said was, “Hey cool!” and “That’s great!” From there, I let the conversation develop naturally. Another example of natural learning happened around the dinner table. My husband was opening a bottle of red wine. The label on the bottle read: Seven Deadly Zins, which quickly led to a discussion of the seven deadly sins. About half way through the meal, Harry whispered in my ear, “Hey Mama! I think the characters in Spongebob Squarepantsare based on the seven deadly sins. Mr Krabbs is greed, Patrick is sloth, Squidward is wrath, and Sandy is pride.” I was totally shocked, and at the same time I thought this was pretty great! I don’t think I would have made a connection like that until I was well into my university studies! Despite the fact that Harry at age 8 is only a beginning reader, he is capable of rather advanced literary analysis of the shows he watches. We then spent more time that evening trying to figure out if the rest of the sins were represented in the show. That was a fun conversation that reminded me again that there is so much going on beneath the surface when it might appear that someone is “just” zoning out in front of a “screen.” The mind is always working – absorbing information and connecting it to things already known. Doing things for pleasure are the most educational activities of all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to arrange a trip to tour the Mint. -Sylvia Woodman has been thinking and writing about unschooling for more than five years. She spends time on Facebook helping out on several unschooling groups including Radical Unschooling Info and Unschooling Mom2Mom. She is a leader with her local La Leche League group. Sylvia has been married to her husband Jim for 14 years and they have two children, Gabriella and Harry, who have never been to school.

When I learned to square dance we started off with the simple steps. The teacher showed us what to do when the caller said, “Swing your partner,” “Do-si-do,” or “Promenade.” Eventually we learned tougher calls, such as the “Teacup chain.” Two simple words – “Teacup chain” – would cause each of us to make a series of moves over 32 counts. It wasn't so very difficult because many of those moves were just the simple steps that we'd already learned so well. Learning square dance calls consisted of learning labels for larger and larger “chunks” of dance moves. It's not all that different from learning other dance choreography, although the movement vocabulary changes. Actually, it is not so different from learning any other skills, concepts or subject matter. We humans learn and memorize all sorts of different things because of our ability to “chunk.” Psychologists have been talking about “chunking” since 1956, when George A. Miller wrote a paper about “The Magical Number Seven.” He pointed out that one of the tools we humans use to get around our terribly limited short-term memory, which can only hold around seven bits of information at a time, is to associate multiple bits of information into a chunk and slap a label on it. Then, when we are working in our short-term memory, we can use the chunk labels to access many more bits of information from our long-term memory. Melissa M. Kibbea and Lisa Feigensonb have recently shown that even toddlers as young as two years old use chunking as they learn things. Obviously, we do not need anyone to teach us how to “chunk.” However, it can be useful to explain to kids that learning skills and subject matter is, to some extent, as simple as learning the labels for more and larger chunks of information they already know. For example, kids learn in their early years that the sun provides us with light, that most plant leaves are green, that plants need sunlight and water to live, and that, while animals need to eat, most plants do not. When they are older, they can learn larger chunks of information that utilize, in part, these simple facts, and label these larger chunks chlorophyll and photosynthesis and food chains and so forth. Like moving almost automatically through 32 counts when I heard “Teacup chain,” a child who has learned about photosynthesis can access all the smaller chunks of information he or she has coded under that label.It can also be useful to kids to learn about other aspects of memory. For example, robust music tends to be easier to remember than verbal information, and so the rhythms and rhymes of music can be used to help kids memorize facts, especially facts that are presented in a particular order, such as the planets in our solar system. Visual images tend to be easier to remember than verbal information, so making diagrams, maps, or “memory cartoons” can help kids recall geological processes and geographical information. Memory systems such as Memory Palace can help kids remember lists of things such as vocabulary words or the names of the elements. Overlearning (repetition, repetition, repetition), active recall (rather than passive rereading), and spaced repetition (spacing out your active recall sessions minutes, hours, and days apart) are all useful for memorizing things such as lines in a play. Much of education does not rely on memorization techniques and what might be termed “study skills.” Instead, it is deep learning achieved by going places, doing things and playing. This sort of experiential learning gets in deep because it often comes at us while we are feeling relaxed and happy, and because it comes at us through our eyes as well as our ears, and through our hands and bodies and sometimes even tongues and noses! Experiential learning helps us build “hooks” on which later learning can be hung. Often, the later learning can be obtained through reading a book, watching a YouTube video or TV show, or listening to a lecture—the kids with hooks built through experiences, especially travel and play, are able to better absorb and store in long-term memory the concepts and vocabulary seen or heard in the more passive learning situation. For example, kids with a lot of experience throwing, catching, hitting and chasing balls, are able to grasp physics concepts about flight trajectories, bouncing or falling bodies more easily than kids with little experience playing with balls. Kids who have scrambled up ladders, peeked into kivas, and surveyed the land around the ruins of ancient Puebloan settlements are more likely to absorb names like Anasazi, words like kiva, and the concepts surrounding life in cliff dwellings. Thinking and learning about memory can help us homeschool our kids, and I would advise that we also pass on what we have discovered about memory to our kids. Kids are born already knowing how to learn, but we can help them learn how to learn whatever they need or want to know more effectively. Cathy Earle is an education writer who homeschooled her three daughters up to college. You can read what one of her daughters now writes about those experiences at The No-School Kids: A Homeschool Retrospec­tive , and you can find Cathy's free resource for kids at Every Day is Special.  Sources: “Developmental origins of recoding and decoding in memory,” by Melissa M. Kibbea and Lisa Feigensonb, Science Direct, 2014. “Music and Movement – Instrumental in Language Development,” by Maryann Harman, M.A., Early Childhood News.” “Memory Systems: Image-Based Techniques for Memorizing Almost Anything,” www.Memory-Improvement-Tips.com

The colors of fall have moved on, or rather moved indoors to dance in fireplaces and wood stoves. White blankets, frosty ice, and foggy breath greet us, as wool hats and gloves are donned, so that we can go about our days or just get out to where things are wide and open. These are the days for moving slowly.These are the days that welcome extra snuggles, warm meals, and shared stories. What better time for a family read around or read aloud, not only to connect us in story and in conversation, but also to help the wee ones (or old) learn to love to read. One of the many lessons my middle and high school students taught me, as their reading and writing teacher, is that you are never too old to hear a story read aloud. If given the choice, they were thrilled to stretch out on beanbag chairs and the floor and allow the story we were witnessing to live behind their eyelids. Along our journey into story, we'd stop periodically to discuss our favorite parts, our questions, words or topics we weren't familiar with. We'd bridge back to related history or the events of today, to themes and symbols. Regardless of age, conversations about story help readers connect to story. Connecting to the story helps readers live in the story, which makes them want to read more, and in doing so, they become stronger readers. Many books, short stories, poems, or essays can become a family read aloud. Taking turns choosing a text allows all members to feel invested and to experience new genres or stories one might not choose. Old favorites like the Little House series, Charlotte's Web, Harry Potter, and To Kill a Mockingbird, and new reads like The Hunger Games and The City of Ember, or poetry anthologies like This Same Sky, can create interesting conversations and, if wanted, help families discuss big topics in a safe, communal way. In order to prompt discussion, one thing that can help everyone be involved is for the reader to pause after an important part or the end of a large section or chapter and simply open the room for discussion. To help prompt discussion, questions can be written on index cards and chosen randomly, be handed out, and used as inspiration. Questions might look like: What do you like or dislike about the story or characters? What do you wonder? What do you question? What do you see in your mind's eye while we're reading? What are you connecting to? What does this section remind you of? What do you think is going to happen? These simple response questions lead readers deeper into a story, help them connect with each other, and possibly even help a reluctant reader want to read or be read to. So often students of mine who were reluctant or struggling readers had difficulty seeing the book’s images in their heads. We’d talk about the importance of seeing “the movie” that was being painted by the words. Once students realized this was something readers do and began to do so, they often found reading a lot more enjoyable and were able to connect and understand the text in a new way. Another way to stimulate discussion is for the reader to pause and simply say, “Say something,” or “What do you picture?” or “What is on your mind?”. Of course, reading together as a family helps foster a love and appreciation of reading too! The more we read to and with our children, the more they will love to read. Reclaiming time together, in story and imagination, means giving our children and ourselves the gift of a love of reading that can carry us through the dark days of winter into the beauty of spring and maybe to a new read on picnic blankets or with toes sunk in sand. The possibilities are truly endless. Kelly Sage writes about simple living and the joy of doing so on her blog Sagetribe . After nine years of teaching middle and high school English, Kelly has recently begun to homeschool and put more energy into her love of writing. She facilitates writing circles at Writing for (a) Change in Bloomington, IN., loves to take family hikes, and put whole foods on the family table.

There are advantages, profound and beautiful, silly and fun, to letting your child skip school, every day, for thirteen years. As you'll see, some of the advantages were my child's and some were mine as the parent. I won’t be able to name them all, but I can tell you my top ten favorites. ​ Top 10 Advantages 1. You will have the pleasure of really getting to know your child The wild delight of being able to see and understand what lights her up. And in addition, you’ll get to be the one to help fuel those fires. From one day to the next you’ll know what inspires and excites her, when to help her get more and when she’s had her fill. 2. You’ll learn a lot about how your child learns You’ll learn a lot about learning in general, new stuff you never thought of before. You will be surprised and amazed daily. 3. You will be happier when your child is happy and learning Free from the pressure and burden of the busy work of school. 4. You will never fight with your child over homework Not one shout. Not one tear. 5. Your child will have the gift of learning in peace, safety and comfort. He’ll have time to linger and explore as much as he likes. He’ll have the freedom to move on quickly if an initial interest doesn’t take off. He’ll have the flexibility to pursue many interests at once. 6. Your child will be safe from the harm school can do From being made to feel stupid or slow, or, just as harmful, from being convinced she’s “gifted.” She’ll avoid being stifled by the death march pace of a droning teacher. In unschooling, there’s no such thing as ahead or behind. There’s only learning, and all of it is meaningful. 7. If your child is an introvert, or a little quirky, unschooling will remove the pressure to conform. Unschooling will let him be at ease with himself, away from the crowd and noise of school. He won't have to overcome the suffocating discomfort of compulsory socialization, and can instead choose for himself when and with whom he keeps company. Emotional well being contributes to a richer learning experience. 8. If your child is very physically active, unschooling will help you meet their needs. No maddening time in a desk. No getting in trouble for being wiggly. 9. Unschooling will give your kids the chance to have friends of many different ages Including adult friends and not just adults who want them to recite facts or pass tests, not patronizing grownups, but adults who do interesting work and enjoy talking about it and who don’t feel any pressure to be teacherly. 10. Unschooling will allow your child the time to become an expert Several times over, at Legos or Minecraft, ballet or karate, dinosaurs or spiders. In 1974 John Holt wrote Escape from Childhood, The Needs and Rights of Children. It’s a radical book, as almost all social reform books of the seventies were. It still looks radical to parents and educators today. But his points, in that book, that children are overly controlled, and grossly underestimated, are just as valid today. If you’re bravely wading into the mysterious pool of unschooling and haven’t read that book, it might get you thinking about children and what they can do and what they ought to be able to try, with your experienced help and guidance. Common Criticisms of Unschooling Any time you give children choices that make other parents uncomfortable, anytime you do things very differently, you will face criticism. If you’re lucky it will be mild and easy to overlook. If it’s not, the most helpful thing I know in dealing with criticism is to stay informed about what the critics are saying and to be able to answer criticism with reason and confidence. Children Can't Be Trusted Some people will say children can’t be trusted to make choices, or maybe they can make very inconsequential choices, like what color shirt to wear today, but certainly not choices about what they’d like to do with their time. But adult life is all about making choices, every day, choices that get you closer to your goals. The best way to learn to make good choices is have lots of experience making choices, experience with mistakes and learning how to bounce back, having many chances to test how well you can predict outcomes. You're Cheating the World Out of Specialists Some people will say that you could be irresponsibly cheating the future of much needed scientists, and mathematicians, by letting a potentially talented child play in mud, and paint all day, instead of studying. But this presupposes that any random child might have a world changing talent for science or math, when in reality most children won’t. And if you happen to have a child with a talent and interest in mathematics or science, the place for specializing those skills and talents is not fifth grade, or even middle school. There will be time for your future Nobel prize winner to get the education and training she needs when she wants it, when her interest drives her there. That might be at age fifteen, or age thirty-five. You're Not QUALIFIED! Some people will say you may not have the skills to help your child learn everything he’ll need in the future. They’re right! The world changes fast. It might be that the job your child will be doing in twenty-five years hasn’t even been imagined yet. If it doesn’t exist, the skills for it are as yet unknown to parents *and* to teachers. But a child with access to the world and lots of interesting people and the time to explore, has a much better chance at learning emerging skills and technology than a child in school plodding through a curriculum with outdated science books. In Escape from Childhood, Holt writes: “Young people have to be trained, in part by what we tell them, mostly by how we treat them, to think of themselves as irresponsible, incompetent, ignorant, foolish, no-account.” One of the greatest advantages of unschooling is that you get to see and know your child as a competent, serious, smart, responsible human being, full of hope and wonder. It will change you forever. It will change the world. -Deb Lewis

One of the most exciting and convenient things about homeschooling is the option to travel during off-season. Not only do you get a bargain on travel costs, the experience is always sure to be rich and full of intense learning opportunities. Our family tends to take trips just before big travel seasons like Spring, Summer and Winter school breaks. This always guarantees us lots of space and quiet locations where we can immerse ourselves in the local happenings. Typically, when people take holiday they try to schedule relaxing and entertaining events for their stay. But when planning a homeschooling vacation it’s important to decide what type of experience you want your family to have and what types of things you will want them to learn. Although resorts and all inclusive stays are fun and ensure you have access to things most families need, they are not always conducive to teaching your children about the actual life that is lived in that area. So it is important for our family to decide what type of trip we will be having as this will impact where we stay and how we spend our time. When we are taking homeschooling heavy trips we tend to stay with another family so that way we can really take our time to navigate new culture, food and languages. We have found that these trips work well especially on a budget- if you can visit distant family and friends. Because we have pretty large and diverse families that can be found across North America and into the South Pacific, this is a lot easier for us to do. However, if that is not the case for you- there are a multitude of homeschool families and blogs about World and Road Schooling that can help you make contact with homeschool friendly locations just about anywhere in the world. Oh Canada! Our first family homeschooling trip was to Niagara Falls. As a novice homeschool traveler, I booked us at the Great Wolf Lodge Resort which had amazing spring rates as it was 40 degrees during the time we went. But the wonderfully warm indoor water park allowed us to escape the misty May to see a spectacular museum or tourist location in the area. My kids were seven and two at the time and still needed lots of kid friendly activities which Great Wolf Lodge certainly provided. At that time in our regular homeschool life, we were usually at parks or museums so I made sure to book us a couple of those events. It was simple and easy and seemingly uneventful overall, but it was our first time trying out airports, long flights, and the processes of getting through customs, rental car transactions and navigating new land to find food. The most memorable parts of the trip were the things that didn’t work so well and those silly and awkward family photos they take of you in line at touristy places. Still, we learned a LOT and it prepared our family for future travel. Life in the South Pacific Last year, my family went to the South Pacific and spent some time in Fiji and New Zealand. We were fortunate to spend most of our time in local homes and sprinkle in some touristy resort fun. But it was in the local homes where my children learned about basic life differences that came with things like bathing and sleeping that interested them most. They enjoyed home-cooked meals and shared time with children their age. The laughter they shared lit up the days as they played together in the yard sharing words and comparing their accents with each other. For hours on end they quizzed each other on the alternate names and pronunciations for things around the house. They explored each other’s currency, games and entertainment. Even things like containers for basic grocery products became exciting to examine. Everything around them was new and full of ideas they had never considered. And though we did, spend a pampered day or two at a resort, the most memorable times we had were at the Fijian Farmhouse with the livestock and the wildlife roaming freely around us. Often when we think of learning here in California, we imagine a classroom full of manipulatives and books. But the experience my children had during our time in the South Pacific has had a profound effect on their life and the way they see the world. These experiences have forever changed the way we live and most importantly the way we homeschool. And though I don’t think we will ever be World or Road Schoolers, travel has become an amazing way for our family to connect and enhance our learning. Laurie Gracia-Alikhan- Editor The Homeschooler Post

Students from a homeschool environment have a higher graduation rate than their traditionally schooled peers. "Exploring Academic Outcomes of Homeschooled Students" by Michael Cogan presented this fact. He emphasized that homeschooled students graduate at 66.7% while traditional students graduate at a rate of 57.5%. These numbers do not imply that homeschooled kids will have a breezy college experience or that they should not keep an eye on the horizon. Today, more than ever, students need to hunker down and prepare well to get the most out of their upcoming college life. Tackling Academics Suitable preparation is key to gain entry to a college as many require good SAT scores.College prep classes and courses similar to those in a high school setting can help the homeschooler to get those core requirements. Large universities around California like UC offers helpful academic outreach programs for pre-collegiate students. Online classes are a new age boon for homeschoolers; they can make use of both free and paid for resources to supplement the learning requirements. It also helps promote self-reliance--a trait that they will need not just in college but in adult life as well. Homeschooling has the benefit of letting the student map out their interests so they can pursue their chosen field of academics efficiently. Option Exploration Beyond academics, it is important to find out what the homeschooler's options are for college choices. The beauty of the technology that we have now is that online applications and early correspondence with colleges are a reality. Factoring in the preference of the student, there are a lot of colleges to choose from in the state, the country, and even abroad. Determining the particular course or major that the student wants will help to narrow down the options you both need to look at. Technological Knowledge Homeschoolers need necessary tech skills to help them with projects and assignments in college. Knowing how to handle and troubleshoot issues with their personal computers and other gadgets are crucial. College students benefit greatly from having the tech to help them take notes, create presentations, and even stay in touch. It would be important for parents familiarize their learners with technology by intertwining lessons and appropriate gadgets and programs. Essential Life Skills The most important prep that homeschoolers need is understanding basic survival or life skills and the tools that can help access them. College students should be fully aware of how to do their own laundry, keep a clean space around them, and even cook good meals for sustenance. Starting them early with chores around the home can help significantly. College students are expected to be fully functioning adults and finances will factor into this. With student loans and eventually having to handle jobs, it is critical for a homeschooler to be financially literate. Learning how to handle money should be part of the lessons that parents prioritize especially in the home environment. This helps to raise self-reliant and responsible college students and eventually, productive members of our society. ​ College is a great time for learners to know more about themselves and who they want to be in the future. Parents can help their homeschooled kids be better prepared by being proactive in arming them for the college experience. Take this time to see what else you can do as a parent to help your homeschooler tackle college with confidence and gusto. Kylee Ryers was an academic counselor for over ten years. She now uses her writing to advocate for students.

One of my biggest challenges as a homeschooling mom is keeping up with all of the available book clubs. As an avid reader, it is rare for me to turn down a book. It is even more difficult for me not to have multiple books going at a time. All of these groups have helped me add to my collection, refer friends and family to the right book for them and explore genres I have never read before. The last book club I was in read Connection Parenting by Pam Leo. This was somewhat of a typical parenting book. If you have taken any positive parenting or positive discipline courses, this book will lead you through a process of self-evaluation connected to those basic principles. Leo takes the time to reframe everyday struggles with our children so that we are reminded to honor their needs. Leo teaches that we should model behavior that will lead to solutions rather than solve the problems our children experience with our innate power as parents. She writes that all behaviors are need-driven and that the best way to work with our children is to take the time to learn what they need and how to ease the pain or ache when it is not met. This book was a great reminder to practice and use the tools I have gained from other positive parenting and teaching courses. I share it with you today because Leo also lists MANY other books, websites and organizations for reference in her "Connection Parenting Links” pages. I hope that you can find the resources your family needs to make you homeschooling home a happy one! If you have a life-changing book or a book that could be of reference for homeschooling families share with us today! I would love to hear your thoughts on books, their teachings and share references with our families. If you would just like to send me titles: I would love that too! Happy Reading! Laurie Gracia-Alikhan - Editor The Homeschooler Post

Lissy jumped at the chance to leave school during spring break of second grade. Growing up in the Toronto area with her two brothers, once they left school, listening to mom read the published Harry Potter books (books one to four at that point) soon became a favourite activity. For the first year or so at home, Lissy professed to hate reading. But without the pressure to learn to read and with the pull of a great story, Lissy’s road to reading began in earnest. She started listening to the Harry Potter books on CD in her room while sewing costumes for her stuffed animals and creating wire jewelry. A new book release in the series was a cause for family celebration. She marked all her favorite places in the books and wrote out many of the signs, letters, and songs found in the storyline. Sometimes she wrote them by hand, sometimes she typed them. Sometimes she followed along in the books. Then one day she decided to try reading on her own and it wasn’t long until she announced herself able to read! She could often be found curling up with a book in any cozy spot she could find, and she’s still an avid reader. Her love for Harry Potter eventually branched into a love of music, interestingly by way of fan fiction, in a great example of those wonderful yet unpredictable connections. When she was thirteen she began going to shows, seeing many alternative bands at small clubs around the US and Canada over the years. She was also in the Girl Guides program from the age of eight, volunteering with the younger girls, and culminating in being awarded the Canada Cord at seventeen. From the age of sixteen she volunteered weekly at the local SPCA thrift store. There weren’t any local support groups back then, so Lissy and her family met up with other homeschoolers/unschoolers at conferences in the United States, and her mom hosted the annual Toronto Unschooling Conference for several years. Lissy became interested in photography around the age of 14. She took photos and explored pictures in magazines, books, and online. She started her first self-portrait 365 project on Flickr when she was 15, spending hours each day working until she had a photo she was happy with. It was an incredible learning experience, and she received lots of encouraging feedback. At 16 she was approached by a photographer’s agent in Toronto and signed with her for commercial work. When asked on her blog if she planned on being a photographer for living, and, if she hadn’t discovered photography what would she have done, she replied: A month after turning 18, she went to New York City on her own to explore the photography and art community there and see if she’d enjoy city life. She had plans for two months, and ended up staying six. She loved it, and at the end of 2013 she came home just long enough to complete a US O-1 Extraordinary Ability Visa application, a 700-odd page tome. Still 18, her application was approved for the full three-year term, and the afternoon her paperwork arrived by courier, her mom drove her back to NYC for a client meeting the next afternoon. Lissy draws inspiration for her enchanting photos from childish things—tutus and tea parties and battling imaginary dragons—and she enjoys turning those adventures into her art. She likes to take things that are big and scary and put them into a fantasy context so they don’t seem so real. She hopes her photos help people maintain a childlike spirit and persevere in the face of a challenge. Lissy’s images can be seen on several book and album covers, in magazines, in stores, and have even inspired a music video. Her work has been exhibited internationally. One image was the face of the UK National Theatre’s production of Antigone. She has shot ads, editorials, and fashion campaigns and currently has an online presence of over 80,000 followers. -Lissy (Elle) Laricchia is a 20-year-old photographer from Ontario, Canada, living in New York City. She was recently selected as one of Flickr’s 20under20.​ 

100 Classes for Black Kids was created by homeschool mother of two, Amelia Butler. As a parent of two Black kids and a homeschool group...

Why did you decide to homeschool? All of us who homeschool know this is a never-ending question. But what happens when you can't really...

Yes! One hundred percent yes - your kids can do school at home and, if they so choose, go on to college! I removed my kids from the...

Where you choose to spend your time and build your homeschool community has a very powerful impact on your experience. Often when families begin to homeschool, they just jump in and tag along with any and everything that comes their way. But as the years go by they learn to streamline and tailor their children’s needs. One of the struggles that I hear from many families of color that there are limited spaces where our children see themselves reflected in leadership positions that also support a self-directed line of learning. So I would like to share the top two resources that helped my family create the homeschooling lifestyle we love so much. I hope that by accessing the work available from these wonderful and different sources of teaching you too will be able to create an optimal learning space for your child. When I first heard of unschooling I was attending a park day near my home that did not reflect our needs aside from being geographically close and free to attend. The resources I was provided from that group reflected that their interests and concerns and didn’t easily line up with concepts that lead to my need for homeschooling. Unschooling, at times, can have an atmosphere of seemingly toxic positivity where needs are ignored in regard to culture, ancestry and political impacts for families of color. However, Akilah addressed these issues immediately within the first few minutes of her podcast. Her stance on self-directed education was based on all the things I needed to hear about homeschooling. She addressed my fears and it felt like she truly understood what it took for me to lead my family down this path. Her guidance helped me find and create new spaces for my family to exist with others on the same journey. I listened to all of her podcasts and followed all of her work. When she announced she would be in Los Angeles for her 100th episode, I had found a new homeschooling group that shared my concerns. Our community was thrilled to host an event to hear her speak in person! Akilah has been a guiding force in my homeschool journey and I highly recommend her work to anyone who is struggling to find their own unique footing in their learning. The Akilah Event we held in our community brought many women together. This is where I first met Ndindi Katong PhD. who runs Angeles Workshop with her husband Scott Stubbe. Angeles Workshop is a progressive middle and high school for students seeking a small school environment, no mandatory homework, weekly field trips and more. I was thrilled when Ndindi and Scott gave me the opportunity to teach a ten-week art workshop based on Indigenous Art of the Southwest with their middle school students. Their amazing set up allowed my son to also shadow my workshop which helped expand his ideas of what homeschooling could be. In addition to learning about art from our homeland, he was also able to make friends and expand his social circle with the other students. Where Akilah helped me idealize a type of school for my children, Ndindi and Scott made it a reality. Ndindi and Scott have an amazing site full of resources to learn about any topic. They do a wonderful job of promoting social justice work and connecting their students to the surrounding neighborhoods. They have designed the student day in a way that allows them to connect to the communities around them which makes their learning relevant and up-to-date. They also work with community experts who bring years of knowledge to share with the whole school weekly. Angeles Workshop is truly a one of a kind learning space. If you are in the Los Angeles area, Angeles Workshop has year-round open enrollment and homeschool hybrid scheduling available. More about them can be found on the web at www.AngelesWorkshop.com . Have an amazing homeschool resource in your area? Send me a write up of your experience! We love to share what is going on in all of our homeschool communities. Laurie Gracia-Alikhan - Editor The Homeschooler Post

If you are having a busy summer like me, then you probably got lost in the whirlwind of charter school political changes that were made this summer. Below are some highlights for those of you are with charters or thinking of homeschooling with charter schools this year. Completely new to charters? If this is your first year homeschooling and are still looking into options, you may want to start off with this FAQs page from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools website . From there you may want to view the websites of individual charter schools and compare their requirements to see which best would support your family. You may also enjoy reading this recent article detailing common misconceptions about Charter schools in this article by Nathan Barrett, Ph.D. who serves as the senior director of research and evaluation for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. This article also includes several links to various other resources that will help you decide if homeschooling through a charter works for your family. California Charter Legislation Brief This year two anti-charter school bills moved through the legislature. AB 1505 and 1507 were passed out of the Senate Education Committee in early July. They will now move to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Among other provisions, these bills would allow districts to consider fiscal impact when making decisions about charter school applications and would significantly restrict the ability of charter school applicants to appeal district denials. To be a little bit more specific here are some concerning issues that I found during my research: AB1505: Eliminates the right of a charter group and its parents to appeal politically motivated decisions to close charter schools. AB 1505 increases difficulty for high-performing charters to rely on student learning gains for approval. AB1506: caps the number of new charter schools in California based percentages of pupils enrolled in a district; limits new charter schools from being able to serve pupils in need and limits existing charters from extending service areas to new counties where they can reach students in need. AB1507: makes it harder to locate school facilities in places that make the most sense for families by deleting common-sense flexibility that already exists in current charter law. This bill has been fast-tracked because it was deemed to have no fiscal impact on the State of California. Although these bills initially sound like they are distant from impacting our daily lives, they are definitely having unforeseen impacts on our charter experiences. Those of us who homeschool with Charter have seen lots of changes which alter the way we utilize our educational funds go into effect this summer. In some cases, charters have shut down enrichment programs we heavily rely on. Some of those changes have made it impossible for families to continue to homeschool while others were not affected as greatly. Regardless of how you feel about the changes there are plenty of resources out there to help you navigate through what happened with each specific charter. The California Charter Schools Association has a Legislative Advocacy list of bills they approve and oppose to make it easier for us to follow collectively. Let's Discuss Please remember that this link is biased to what works for my family viewpoint and what a majority of California charter families follow based on the collective association. I encourage and appreciate anyone who would like to post alternative resources to these in the comments. I completely understand that these views may not work for you and may appear limited. Please find or share your resources kindly below so that we can create a dialogue that serves all charter affiliated homeschoolers which will allow them to make the political decisions that best assists their family. 

Homeschoolers are an enigmatic lot. They seem to make news with increasing regularity, whether it's by winning academic contests, volunteering in their communities, climbing the music charts or speaking out through the local newspaper or television. But the facts behind who they are and why they make the choices they do are often obscured in the fifteen-second sound bite or local-interest story. Little understood, they are often mischaracterized or homogenized into white-bread pawns in an educational war fought by increasingly bitter opponents.

Preparing students for college and careers is every educator’s goal which is why teaching 21st century skills has become a noteworthy task. Ideas of what it means to be up to speed in technology has always crafted educational plans, but what exactly are 21st century skills? In the early 2000s, it meant that kids would need to be proficient in emailing and computer basics. Then coding and web design perked up. And while many educators still implement these concepts into their work, the tech field has advanced and morphed in many different ways making it impossible to develop any standard foresight of which skills kids will need for college and careers five years from now. Today the internet is booming with young entrepreneurs in every field from advertising to e-sports making the way we conduct business very different than the past. Cameras and videos are no longer for recording sentimental family moments. Paired with the internet these tools have become doorways into business for many families-and their children. Video games are no longer just a fun pastime for kids after school. Today colleges like UC Irvine are offering scholarships for gamers and host entire departments for e-sport communities. As educational institutions embrace this industry, children with access to this world are advancing faster than anyone else. Victor Palacios, founder of Game Crossings LLC, saw this as an opportunity to do something positive for his neighborhood and gathered a group of young gamers to play and organize tournaments- keeping them off the streets and focused on something that they could turn into a business while also preparing them for college opportunities. Game Crossings LLC is an organization designed to teach children ages ten and up how to build their own PCs, organize tournaments, and live-stream their play. As the team developed, their streaming caught attention online and their skills demonstrated proficiency as they started taking big wins at tournaments. Victor has bridged his latest course with UC Irvine and CSU Fullerton to ensure that his team has the foundations needed to manage their online personalities for long term business plans. His course also focuses on values about financing, leadership, team work and production of the e-sport business allowing students to start their careers in their teens. Now that many of his original team are graduating from high school, Game Crossings is expanding and teaching a whole new group to start their journey in the e-sports world -essentially helping 10-14 year olds get into the business earlier than before. Like all things, not all of these young gamers will become a famous pro-player. Still, the transformation of the tech world will surely provide an avenue for them to follow that they possess these 21st century skills. With the ability to create their own schedules and freedom to travel to tournaments during established school hours, this may be the time to set your homeschool gamer up for their big break!  Laurie Gracia-Alikhan- Editor The Homeschooler Post

I’m sitting on the edge of a volcano in a northern province of Ecuador with three of my best friends, watching the sun rise over the lake inside of the crater. We’ve spent the last three days navigating unreliable bus lines, getting lost, and backpacking through the Andean Sierra to reach this vista, and now that we’re here, I know that it’s something I’ll never forget. This experience was one of the many adventures that I had during the eight months I spent living in Ecuador while on my gap (or “bridge”) year with a program called Global Citizen Year. Before going abroad, I had homeschooled my entire life, so the decision to take an alternate path to college wasn’t a difficult one for me to make. I had always dreamed of living or studying abroad, of learning a second language (especially Spanish) and of getting to know a foreign culture in a way that seemed more genuine than just vacationing there. Ecuador interested me because I knew so little about it, only that is was a juxtaposition: a mix of Spanish and indigenous languages spoken; a mix of Amazon rainforest, Galapagos Islands, and mountainous Andes straddling both hemispheres, all within a total area smaller than California; the peculiarity of abounding mega-diverse environments in a country whose economy is driven by petroleum exports. The more I learned about Ecuador, the more questions I had, and the more I wanted to explore this Latin American country in depth. The year leading up to college proved to be the perfect opportunity to do just that. During my bridge year, I lived with an Ecuadorian family in San Bartolomé, a tiny rural town high up in the Sierra, known for farming apples and for producing hand crafted guitars. I worked as a teacher’s assistant in the local elementary and high schools three days per week, helping students with their English homework and grading papers, among kids who were more excited, probably, to have a foreigner in their midst than to learn the language. One day per week I would commute about an hour by bus into Cuenca, the country’s third largest city and a colonial historical site, to study Spanish with the other exchange fellows from my program. Another day I would work with one of my Ecuadorian neighbors on her farm, learning to plow plots of land by hand and milk cows, and on the weekends, I would accompany her into the city to sell her vegetables. Looking back on my experience, I realize how heavily my homeschool education impacted my time abroad. I went to Ecuador already comfortable with learning through experience and experiment, with learning by asking the questions that interested me, and by listening to people’s stories. In Ecuador, I took this approach and as a result, learned how to speak Spanish, how to make empanadas, the basics of soccer, how indigenous groups are working to preserve their native culture, how the civil rights issues there mirror many of the same ones playing out here in the United States, and perhaps most importantly, how to trust myself. Living with my host family and getting to know their life from an inside perspective gave me the chance to witness an Ecuador that was more diverse, more complex, and more beautiful than the one I’d read about in any book. After an incredibly transformational bridge year, I will be studying biology at my local community college, and later hope to transfer to UC San Diego to continue in the field of marine science. While I’ve always been interested in this field, I feel that my bridge year allowed me the time and space to gain a greater appreciation for all the opportunities that I have to pursue my dreams. I think my time in Ecuador specifically inspired me to ask, listen, and care more about the issues facing my generation- from indigenous people’s rights to climate change- and to realize that these issues are global. I know that I will take with me to college all of the many lessons that I learned in Ecuador, but this one stands out from the rest: that making the choice to learn about what you care about will always be the right choice. -Lily Jorrick is a 19-year-old homeschool alumni who lives in Northern California, and hopes to continue traveling and learning languages in the future. Her bridge year in Ecuador was made possible in part by a generous scholarship from the Homeschool Association of California.