I’ve become inundated with catalogs -catalogs from the YMCA and surrounding towns. My e-mail is piling high with private classes offerings – circus classes, theater classes, co-op classes, and science and art classes. I have tons of newsletters from museums, nature centers, churches, libraries, arboretums, children’s museums that are all screaming at me to…
Category: Parents
An Invitation to Learning
Imagine opening up your mailbox and pulling out two invitations. Each invitation is to a party. Each invitation will have food, drinks and entertainment. But each party is very, very different from the other. The first party is to a work function. It calls for formal dress attire and you’ll be talking most of the night with…
When Technology Gets in the Way of Love
* We’ve had a wonderful week in Acadia National Park. Today we’re driving down the coast, exploring some lighthouses along the way until we reach Portland, Maine. Then tomorrow we head for Boston! On Wednesday I brought you a powerful post by Elizabeth from Sattvic Family. Today, her husband Billy, who writes his own blog at…
Is Interest-Led Learning Really Child-Led Learning….or Something Else?
When I first heard the term child-led learning I thought it was wonderful. Letting children take the lead in their learning was a new and exciting concept for me 8 years ago. But in the past few years, that phrase started to bother me. I want my kids to be self-directed learners. I want their…
Saying Yes – A Poem
I’ve been struggling a bit with my health this past week. I guess I should say that my biggest struggle has been that I’ve had to say no a lot more this week to the kids than I would like. It breaks my heart not to have the energy to play most of the day…
Why Kids Need to Take More Risks Not Less
One day last summer I took the kids to a nearby park. I was enjoying a rare moment of reading alone when I heard a woman gasp. I glanced up at her, and she looked over at me with a scared look on her face. “Oh my goodness! Is that your son?” she asked. I…
10 Authors to Inspire You on Your Interest-Led Learning Path
The first book I read about unschooling was John Holt’s Learning All the Time. That book totally changed the way I looked at the way kids learn best. During my first year as a public school teacher, I had been reading articles and blog posts about how kids were learning without following a teacher-prescribed curriculum….
How and Why We Monitor Screen Time
A few people have asked me questions in the past few months about our rules about screen time in our family. It’s a tricky subject and one that I’ve had to think about for awhile. It’s been hard for me to come up with a concrete, simple answer because we don’t have any hard and…
Flexible Daily Routines: Meal Planning & Preparation
Do you like cooking? Are you a meal planner or do you like deciding what to eat for dinner a couple of hours before eating? I like to cook. Before I had kids, I really liked pouring over cookbooks and trying new things all the time. I never was very experimental, but I was much…
Flexible Daily Routines: Laundry, Dishes & Straightening
In my last post I shared about how I set up my cleaning system for my house that complements our lifestyle of learning. I think even more important than my cleaning system are the few flexible routines I’ve developed that help keep my house from becoming chaotic and me not feeling frustrated and a slave…