My family loves to travel. This year we’ve traveled to Nevada, San Diego, St. Louis, Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri, and Saugatuck, Michigan plus we have two more trips planned before the end of the year. But as much as I love to travel to new places, some of my best memories of this year have…
Tag: natural learning
Tips for Learning When Mom’s Sick
On Monday, I woke up to a house that was messy, laundry needed to be done and the kids were begging to play with me. Little by little that gnawing feeling of tension started to well up inside; how was I going to get it all done today? Of course, I already knew the answer….
Bartering for Knowledge & Giving it Away
I wrote last Wednesday about how to mine your home school community for rich resources. But what about people outside the homeschooling community? Is there a trend towards freely sharing our knowledge with each other in ways that will benefit everyone? I’m happy to say, yes, there is. Maybe not a big trend, but it’s…
Interest-Led Sharing: Mining the Rich Resources of Your Homeschooling Community
A few weeks ago my children and I were privileged to take a tour of a local farm. Almost always when you sign up to take a tour, you’re required to pay a field trip fee. Then you’re usually restricted what you can do on the tour, either because the group is too large for…
Living & Learning – Tips for Including Your Young Child in Your Daily Life Part 2
Last Saturday I started a post where I shared tips for including your young child in your daily life. To read the first part CLICK HERE Now on to Part 2 3. Task – Doing the laundry. * Categorizing and separating clothes into separate piles *working together to load the washer and dryer *folding…
Interest-led Learning in the Mainstream-September 2011
I believe in the power of interest-led learning to transform the face of education. I believe it’s the only way that children learn naturally, the way they were born to learn. When children’s interests and imagination are captured, it provides the intrinsic motivation for them to learn more, create meaningful, personal goals and retain a…
Learning through Living – Tips for Including Your Young Child in Your Daily Life Part 1
Young children learn by doing. Actually, we all learn best by doing- it’s the best way to create the neural pathways in our brain that allows learning to really “stick.” But, young children especially need a lot of time to use all their senses in learning. Young children also want to do real things. I…
15 Interest-Led Learning Families You Should Get to Know
Unschooling blogs usually read like a diary. A peek into other people’s lives. It’s not that you don’t get that peek in more traditional homeschooling blogs, but unschoolers tend to live unusual lives….and I like unusual! You get to see what resources and materials they use in the context of their lives. You get to…
10 Not-Your-Usual Fun Fall Ideas
There’s five more days of summer left. That’s it. Not that I’m complaining. Since we’re a school-free family, our lives are not that affected by the days of the year. We can still play outside all day if we’d like, or stay inside and work on projects indoors. Instead of feeling the crispness of the…
Instead – An Unschooling Poem
I thought I ‘d do something a little different today. Since I was in a creative mood I wrote a poem. INSTEAD Instead of waking up in a flurried frenzy of speed dressing, food gobbling and “Can you hurry, up please?” we’re eating breakfast in our p.j.s, rubbing sleep from our eyes, and…