Unschooling Teens and Trust

In January we will be marking the third year of our homeschooling/unschooling journey.
Daughter was 11 when we started and after a few weeks of failed attempts to school at home we found ourselves working our way toward unschooling.  It has been gradual taking the better part of the first two years to deschool, a process [...]

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What Living With Teenagers Has Taught Me – #1

I AM as stupid as I thought my parents were.
Today my 14 year old had to explain what a “peripheral” is.  Now I know what peripheral vision is but I never before heard it used as a techy term.  What do you want, I got my first cell phone last year!
Casually she said, “You [...]

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Author, Author

It’s amazing how easy it is to forget that I’m writing working on ignoring a book.
Of course a lot has happened since I started it almost 7 years ago.  I’ve had the oldest bird leave the nest, only to come back and leave again several times.  We started homeschooling and even though it’s without doubt [...]

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Learning More Than You Know

We’ve been homeschooling for 2 and half years now.  It really doesn’t feel like it’s been that long and at the same time I can’t believe she was in school less than 3 years ago.
Since we pulled Daughter out of school she’s taken many outside courses;  cooking, computer animation, cooking, digital movie making, cooking and [...]

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Oh Yeah, right, We Homeschool

Our yearly letter arrived from the school board today.
“Please notify us of your intentions for the upcoming 2009/2010 school year.”
Honestly, the first two times we received this letter sent me into panic mode.  Not that we had to do anything other than respond with a polite “we intend to continue homeschooling” letter, still I felt [...]

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The Power of /ignore

Some weeks ago Daughter got an e-mail from the administrator of one her on-line communities.  She wasn’t quite sure if the content meant that she was in trouble or not so she asked me to read it.
It was an apology and an assurance that the account of the person who had been bullying her was [...]

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Demystifying Multiplication

I have to give out two Hat Tips for today’s post to some rockin’ women who, like me, spent most of their lives thinking that they sucked at Math and that they would never “get” it.
First to Child’s Play for her Math Mondays posts where she documents her family’s homeschooling journey into the world of [...]

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Progress Through the Past

Above and beyond the benefits of our choice to homeschool/unschool that I’ve seen for Daughter over the last two years (of which I’ve written plenty about), I’m still often surprised by how much I’m learning about myself.
For instance, before homeschooling, I didn’t know I was such a history buff.
At first my interest in the middle [...]

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The Joy of Learning

So now that the holidays are over and winter has officially set in (as I type this it’s snowing big fluffy flakes), we turn our attention back to homeschooling.
Two years in now, I think we’re finally settling into a groove…well, rather a waltz.  The pace of our lives has slowed so much that we not [...]

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A little less socialization please…

Now, we’ve all heard the myth that homeschooled children lack socialization.
And after two years of homeschooling I will in fact heartily agree that my child “lacks” the usual standardized, institutionalized and one-grade-fits-all socialization.
Not that she didn’t have plenty of exposure to it.  Nearly eight years in public school assured that she got a good dose [...]

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