Organically Inclined » homeschool

Quote of the Day

Mish — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:00:39 +0000

Courtesy of the Riesenbergs, an unschooling family with 9 kids in Ohio…

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” –Albert Einstein

Technorati Tags: einstein quote, radical unschooling, unschooling

Quote of the Day – John Holt

Mish — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:49:58 +0000

“Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how.” -John Holt

I love this quote. It helps me when I think we’re not doing enough “homeschooler” things. The only problem I have with being a homeschooler is that I occasionally feel like I’m inadequate for the task. Sometimes I don’t want to try and make everything we do a “learning experience.” Then I remember, living and learning go hand in hand. That if I answer the questions my children have and if we look things up and discover things together – that’s learning. I don’t have to try and push and make them journal all of their experiences or create experiences just for them to learn things. We follow our curiosity and we follow our passions and eventually we learn what we want to do and what we don’t want to do.

A process of elimination. I tell my children frequently that they should explore and do things that interest them. “But what if I don’t like it?” my son asked. “Well, then, you can cross one more thing off the list of what you don’t want to do when you grow up.” Sometimes, I think, it’s important to explore things that you might have a small interest in if only to learn that you don’t like it. If you don’t explore it, though, then you’ll never know and you may find yourself always wondering…

Technorati Tags: homeschooling, how to unschool a large family, john holt, radical unschooling, unschool, unschooling

Book Review: “What Really Matters”

Mish — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:55:40 +0000

“What Really Matters” by David Albert and Joyce Reed is a remarkable conversation between two homeschooling parents and advocates. Joyce Reed is a retired Associate Dean at Brown University and homeschooled her five children. David Albert is a writer and homeschooling father of two.

Reading through their experiences and thoughts on life learning is a breath of fresh air. This isn’t a book about how to teach your kids. It isn’t about which workbooks to buy and which curriculum to follow. It doesn’t give you a schedule, or worksheets or tell you that kids need a gold star at the end of each day.

Imagine you are a new homeschooling parent (or even an old one like me), and David and Joyce sit near you at a restaurant. They start to have this amazing conversation about homeschooling and what they did and what they think and you get to hear all of it (much to the annoyance of your partner sitting across from you).

Joyce says in the chapter, Perfection is the Enemy of Excellence, that “…schools – and often parents, and ultimately the kids themselves – are bound up in this concept of perfection. Kids begin being tested (and trained for testing) from kindergarten on, so it is not surprising that many young people will go without sleep or play to achieve straight A’s and strive for perfect SAT scores – even though they are told that the best colleges and universities do not admit students simply because the have a perfect record, that these institutions want an interesting person, too. The perfection-obsessed kids rush around the world doing “community service” by trying to demonstrate their interest in cheetahs in Africa, orphans in Thailand, schools in Peru (often ignoring, or asking for a contribution to their travels from, their elderly grandfather who would simply love to have them read the Sunday paper to him or put the worm on the hook as they do a little fishing together).”

David responds that while both he and Joyce have benefited from going to college, neither had the benefit of being homeschooled. “Attend to your six-, eight-, or ten-year-olds’ learning needs and desires today, learn to listen really, really well and act upon what you are hearing, and I can virtually guarantee that the future – college or no – will take care of itself. And relax: Perfection has absolutely nothing to do with it, and there is no such thing as excellence that transcends the dogged pursuit of it.

“Remember that whatever is going on in school, at home you have the choice to make sure that love and listening are in no short supply. And ultimately, that is all that really matters.”

With flashes back into their own childhoods and homeschooling days with their own children, what we, the reader, learns from this book is not how to homeschool, but that life is learning and learning is life. Once we decide that learning only happens in a formal setting – be it at school or home – we limit ourselves and our children.

There are many, many pearls to glean from this book (did I just mix my metaphors?), but what I got was a reinforcement of something I think I knew already, but doubt occasionally. What is that? The simple truth that being present and living in the now is the most important thing. Seeing and hearing and paying attention to your children and to the world are what’s important. Always striving and waiting for the next thing is what dooms us to unhappiness. “I’ll be happy when I graduate and get a “real” job and have a better car and a bigger place to live.” These are not the messages we need to be sending (or receiving). Things are good now. Enjoy the journey. Because that’s what really matters.

A copy of this book can be purchased at the Natural Life Books website.

Technorati Tags: david albert, homeschool, homeschooling, john taylor gatto, joyce reed, natural life books, unschooling, what really matters

Workbooks

Mish — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 12:01:00 +0000

Do workbooks equal good homeschooling?

As a kid, I loved workbooks. I loved workbooks in school and I loved the ones my mother bought me at the store. I also loved the activity books they sold around Christmas time. I loved to color the pages, do the word puzzles and answer the questions. It was something I was good at and I felt a sense of accomplishment at the end of each page. However, I have had a lifelong issue with seeking validation, perhaps related to my love of workbooks!

My boys don’t like workbooks. Not even a little. They don’t like activity books or workbooks. They think they’re silly and a waste of time. If I suggest getting out one of the expensive workbooks I purchased at the school supply store (a favorite place of mine), they sneer and hem and haw. They sigh heavily and bargain with me about how many pages they have to do before they can go back outside and play.

My oldest, who is now off on his own and no longer homeschooling, liked workbooks as a small child. Or maybe he didn’t and just learned that if he did them quick I’d get off his back! Either way, I thought for a long time that the only way to teach kids things was to get them a workbook. Weird, huh? Well, we live and learn.

Jack is 5 and he hates workbooks. Hates them. And I can’t blame him. For their time, workbooks probably seemed like a good idea. But in the age of computers and other technology like the iPod Touch, having to work in a workbook just seems silly. Now, I know that there are some that will say that we need to teach our children how to work in a workbook and how to look things up in an encyclopedia. Why? Is the Internet going to go away anytime soon? I seriously doubt it. I used to spend hours laboriously looking up things in the library. I did, for the most part, love that work. But I have not lost my love for research – in fact, my day job depends on my ability to research – and I do all of it on the computer now. I still love my books, but I also love my laptop and my Kindle.

What is the difference if Jack learns math and reading in a computer program or, GASP, at the grocery store, rather than in a workbook? There is no difference. In fact, his ability to use technology, I believe, will only help him because I’m pretty sure that when he gets his first job as a fighter pilot (his current career of choice), they’re not going to give him a workbook with the controls of the plane illustrated on it and if they do, he’ll be so happy to be a fighter pilot that he’ll do the darn thing anyway.

“But how will your kids learn how to do things that suck if you don’t teach them?” I’ve heard this question for many years, in a variety of forms. How, the question goes, will kids learn to do things that aren’t “good” for them but that they have to do anyway, if we don’t make them get up every morning at 7 am, trudge off to school and then leave them there for hours doing work that is uninteresting?

Why on earth would you want to make someone do something that is unfun or uninteresting for no reason? I mean, life throws us enough curve balls. Things happen. Some days we get to go to the dentist and some days to the beach. It’s not a blast going to the dentist, so should I make my child go to the dentist everyday so he can learn that sometimes we have to go to the dentist? Umm….I don’t think so.

Kids know that sometimes bad things happen, so why not enjoy the good stuff while we can? I have three children who have worked at jobs. They don’t always enjoy getting up and going to the jobs, but they enjoy the reward they get from the job and that’s enough to motivate them. Just like everyone else. I didn’t have to make them practice getting up everyday at 7 am just so someday they would. That’s silly.

Anyway, workbooks aren’t fun to some people. So don’t do workbooks. Just because you homeschool or unschool it doesn’t mean you have to have a school at home. What fun would that be? Isn’t the reason you left school to get out of the “school” way of doing things? I want my kids to learn. And I want them to love to learn. Forcing them to do boring, uninteresting things just because it’s what I did when I was kid is silly. If I wanted to be like that, I’d make them go to school.

Technorati Tags: curriculum, homeschool workbooks, homeschooling, radical unschooling, unschooling, workbooks

We ditched our TV too…

Mish — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:40:09 +0000

Add another mark to the “Mean Mommy” post, because I have thrown our TV into the garage! Yes, my friends – now my children must suffer without cable TV AND a microwave oven! Oh dear Lord someone call social services – how will we survive?`1

I have had a love/hate relationship with the television for quite some time now. When I was a child, it was a love/love relationship. I would have watched all day everyday. I will say, I was addicted to television. I’ve done a lot of research on TV. And I appreciate its benefits, really I do. I believe that there are some very interesting programs out there. As a dedicated unschooler, for the past year and a half I followed the “go ahead and watch what you want when you want philosophy (obviously, with some guidelines for younger viewers). And do you know what I discovered? Not that my children were turning it off and going to play with their Legos or do other things (although often they did), but that usually, they would just watch it. Once, I turned it off and they still sat there and watched it. Waiting.

We turned off the cable TV. We hadn’t had cable TV in many years due to our rural location in Vermont and only watched DVDs and videos there. That was better by far. I still found, though, that even with ample library books, playground equipment – heck, they have a climbing wall in the play room – they still preferred to watch movies ALL OF THE TIME. I would even watch with them sometimes, so used to having the TV on was I. Kiara couldn’t get through a morning without at least 2 episodes of Dora and a Ni Hao Kai Lan. Jack was starting to watch everything Cartoon Network had to offer. Once the cable was gone they found every movie we owned and watched marathons. Unbelievable. This has to end, I thought. While I appreciate that TV can have its place, I also appreciate that it can be a severe addiction.

I watched my children as they watched TV, so mesmerized were they by whatever was on. My daughter would just lay there, on the floor (she used to play while watching) and gaze. The huge TV in our living room was so imposing, so overwhelming to the whole room that it was impossible not to look at it when it. It seemed wholly different than the food issue because when I allow them to choose whatever they want to eat, they generally only have healthy options to choose from. Content did not seem to be the issue. When one Dora the Explorer was watched, that didn’t satiate. Another was needed. And another. The satiation (is that a word?) point was never reached.

I experimented with allowing them to watch whatever (mostly) and discovered that, particularly in my 5 year old, his brain would mold to whatever he was watching. If he watched a mildly violent cartoon, then he played violently. This to me is not using one’s imagination, it’s simply reenacting. The idea, to me, of unschooling, is use one’s own creativity and motivation – not someone else’s.

I understand the “Forbidden Fruit” argument, really I do. I don’t believe in imposing rules, but guiding children through their journey. The journey without TV is a big one for all of us. Having a TV in the living room just made for more rules and conditions. Because there are so many of us, there always had to be time limits and “you can watch that when this is done.” The darn thing was on all day long! Even with just movies, it was always, I want this when so and so is done with that. The whole freaking world seemed to revolve around who was on the TV when. Frankly, I don’t want to battle over it anymore. I think the programming is largely bad; the commercials are worse; and the technology itself is addicting.

Point of fact: The night we ditched the TV, a certain child stopped wetting the bed. Coincidence? I would have thought so except said child remained dry the following four nights without it. Both younger children who could never fall asleep without watching TV, fell asleep, on their own after playing a lot. They weren’t lulled into staying up later and later by the images on the screen. They were tired from playing and they fell asleep when their bodies told them too. So did I! I went to bed at 9pm. Loved it!

I’m also in love with the frugality! I hated paying the cable bill each month. What an awful waste of money.

Last night, we played Scrabble. We also stay up late talking. We have fun and we don’t watch TV. It’s almost as shocking to me as to anyone else. And I’m not that terrible…last night I bought Oreos for everyone!

Technorati Tags: cable TV, commercials, no TV, TV free

Radical Unschooling – An ABC News Report (Video)

Mish — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:16:04 +0000

I watched an ABC “news” report on the Martin family of New Hampshire. Mom Dayna Martin is the unschooling mom of four. What I found so interesting about the report was that despite Juju Chang’s pointed questions about “shouldn’t your kids know who JFK and FDR are?” Dayna’s replies were, while confident, not what people want to hear. I think this is where the misconceptions about unschooling begin. What point I wish Dayna had made (and really, I’m a fan of hers, I love a lot of her stuff), is that we unschoolers do know who FDR, JFK and all the other presidents are. We know who Shakespeare is and we know all about Nathanial Hawthorne and Goethe and all kinds of stuff. We just don’t sit down at a desk and “study” them for hours a day.

We go to the library. We get real books and documentaries and then we talk about the things in them. We talk about who these people are and how their actions in their day affect the current events we are facing now. I subscribe wholeheartedly to the Sandra Dodd notion of strewing. For example, I subscribe to the newspaper and while it’s not the greenest thing I could do (we do use the newspaper for numerous other projects however), it is a good way for the kids to see national and local events and read about what they are interested in.

One of my sons is 14 and wants to go to college in a few years. I would never force a person to take Algebra, but since he would like to go to school, he accepts that part of his day, every day, needs to be devoted to that practice. We also select – at the high school level – academic subjects that he would like to know more about. He then finds the books and materials on his own to read and work with and we discuss them. Sometimes he’ll write something about it and I’ll help him by editing. Other times he’ll just log the books he read on the subject. Often, the other children get very interested in the subject and we have discussions on the topics or the kids get to see or help with experiments or projects.

There is absolutely no reason why a child needs to sit at a desk all day and be lectured to in order to learn. It just doesn’t need to happen.

I often feel like parents and educators think that “well, it’s what we had to do, so they have to too.” That’s so silly! I was never asked if I’d rather stay home and read all day, practice my piano and ride my bike. Given the choice, I would have. What good does it do to make a child get up everyday at a certain time and sit in a box for hours? Prepare them for a whole life of getting up everyday at a certain time, sitting in a box for hours and then waiting for the weekend when they can get as drunk as possible to forget the rest of the week? I don’t want that kind of life for me or my kids.

I want them to be happy where they are and with what they are doing. I want them to find their passions and hopefully make a living from them.

For the record, my older children including the 12 and 14 year old, have no set bedtime or wake up time and each has various activities they are dedicated to doing. The 18 year old, before he set off on his tour of the country, had a job at McDonald’s. Every morning at 3:30 am he woke up and went to work, despite the fact that he had never had an enforced bed or wake up time.

My 14 year old babysits for some local parents and gets up and is ready to go every morning that he works. I don’t yell at him to get up. I don’t tell him to put on clean clothes and brush his teeth. I don’t tell him to eat breakfast. He does these things because he knows that’s what you do. He sees his father go to work everyday. He has seen me head out to jobs when I used to work outside the house. You don’t need to send a child to school everyday, 6 hours a day for 13 years to make that point. Which is essentially, if you want to get paid, look like a person, show up on time and do your job well.

I think that’s my biggest problem with public school – the laborious tedium. The idea that we are all really stupid and without being told 5,000 times that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, I wouldn’t get it. And really, I appreciate the effort, but knowing that fact hasn’t gotten me very far in life.

And the only thing my anxiety attacks over my Algebra homework ever got me was less sleep as a teenager and the notion that if my kids want to learn Algebra, we’ll have to find them a person who likes it. Fortunately, my oldest son figured it out by himself and has been able to help everyone else!

I don’t know – watch the ABC segment for yourself:

I didn’t find it that offensive. I just found it sad that we have to always put a negative spin on things that are different. I wish Juju Chang had commented on how happy and healthy and smart the Martin children appear to be and how it would be nice if so many parents cared for their children and their well-being as much as Dayna obviously does. But of course, we had to say something negative in the end about how they may never know who Shakespeare is. I don’t know…unless you live in a bubble it’s hard not to know who most people are. If you’ve ever seen the Jay Leno segments where he asks people on the street (who went to public school, I’m sure) basic questions they can’t answer, I’m sure you too will agree that even those conforming box-dwellers can get along just fine without remembering what year Columbus sailed the ocean or what the “New Deal” is!

Technorati Tags: abc news, attachment parenting, dayna martin, martin family, radical unschooling, unschooling

Controlling Our Kids’ Food – Would You Do It?

Mish — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:06:03 +0000

I don’t really control what my kids eat. That’s not true. I control what comes into the house. I am very label conscious. I won’t buy anything that has high fructose corn syrup or BHT. If there is an organic version, I’ll buy that. I don’t buy prepackaged foods. I don’t buy pre-made cookies and other treats. Although the occasional bag of Oreos does work its way into our house. We also eat frozen, pre-made pizzas if I have forgotten to make dough in the morning!

I buy a lot – and I mean a lot – of fresh fruit, cheese, all-natural granola bars, applesauce, frozen fruit for smoothies, milk, juice, some types of crackers, carrots, and cereal.

And then I do this crazy thing – I let the kids eat it. Pretty much whenever they want and in whatever order. I’ve had kids who have requested peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, cereal for dinner and all kinds of stuff in between.

Why do I do it? Because I still can’t take more than two cookies out of the cookie jar without feeling like I’m doing something bad. Because I still need to “clean my plate” even at the detriment of my own weight (and I’ve had some issues there) every night at dinner.

I never want my kids to feel like they need to have a “relationship” with food. I want them to be as active as they are, eat good things and then move along with their lives and not obsess about it the way I have throughout my life.

I used to feel like I had to have dessert after dinner, because if I didn’t – I wouldn’t get the opportunity again until the following day. I’ve witnessed my children eat a brownie at 10 am (something I would never have been allowed to do) and then forget about junk food all day long.

When they ask me why I won’t buy those little gummy fruit snacks, I tell them why. “Because they aren’t fruit.” I explain that there are some things I am willing to spend our money on and some things I’m not. I spend our money on real fruit and that’s that. I try not to make a big deal out of it, just explain and move along. It’s our food money and I wish to spend it on real food.

Now, there are some unschoolers who say, buy chips and soda and candy and let them have as much as they want. That’s a very valid point that I am in favor of in some ways – except – that I don’t want to buy it. I refuse to spend our food money on that stuff except for our Rock and Roll Fridays. I just don’t want to encourage the kids to eat it and I don’t want to eat it myself. But, I’ve explained that to the kids and they are good with that. We also don’t go to McDonald’s all of the time. The kids and I might want to stop and get a burger while we’re out, but I do have to, as the “grown-up” in the house, accept the fact that A.) I can’t afford it and B.) It’s gross and I don’t want to.

I appreciate the unschooler philosophy in some of these things, but I also appreciate my budget! So, I don’t control how much they eat of what I bring into the house. Do they have input? Absolutely! They always get to ask for things and we look at them and decide if it’s something we can bring into the house. Watching movies together like Food, Inc. has also helped cultivate our decision-making on food as a family.

I’ve been reading lately about families with lots of kids who put locks on their refrigerator and pantry. For real, I mean John and I might joke about it, but we don’t actually do it! What better way to tell a child that their feelings of thirst or hunger don’t matter? What better way to tell a child that the only time they can eat or drink is when “I” – the universal parent – say so? It’s like putting a newborn on a schedule to eat (oh, wait, I guess some people do that too).

As a society, we are learning more and more to eat when we’re hungry. And then to stop. This is very effective in defeating obesity. By continuing to encourage food schedules in children, we are dooming them to a lifetime of unhealthy eating habits.

Technorati Tags: food, food budgets, frugal living, homeschool, inc. controlling food, large families, large family budgets, unschool, unschooling

Why Unschooling Isn’t Uneducation

Mish — Wed, 19 May 2010 13:56:09 +0000

Jack the Robot - a craft project not commanded by any curriculum or even by mom - just thought up on their own!

I think a lot of people get confused. I think a lot of people think that because my – or other people’s children – are unschooled it means that they aren’t educated. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Just because we don’t follow a set curriculum and do A,B,C,D before a child reaches a certain age, doesn’t mean they aren’t learning. They are learning all of the time. What’s great about it is that I’m not constantly “on them” to do this, that or the other thing.

I was worried for years that Liam couldn’t do his multiplication tables. He still can’t just reel them off to you like I learned how to in school. This infuriated me. We sat for hours with work books and flash cards. I even sent him to school half days so he could take advantage of a special education math program (he is slightly autistic). They couldn’t teach him his times tables either. I’ve done all kinds of programs – visual, auditory, picture-based. But if you ask Liam right now, what’s 4 times 3 – he won’t be able to tell you.

Imagine my complete surprise when I noticed (and he’d probably been doing it all along), that without missing a beat, he told me that we would need 8 boards that were 4 feet long to finish a project. “How many feet of boards?” I asked, just kind of absent-mindedly. “Ummm…32,” he replied. I thought about it a minute and I was like “Holy cow! Liam you can multiply!” He was like “I know…”

All that work – years of work and frustration and he just figured it out. Hmmm….

My children have lots of interests. Jack likes dinosaurs and cars and engines and swords and mythological characters and helping in the garden. Alex is 14 and learning computer programming and draws better than anyone I ever saw. He is also a math whiz and is really good at Tae Kwon Do. Liam has a servant’s heart and loves to mow lawns, babysit and cook for people. He is already a true entrepreneur, constantly setting up businesses.

My kids volunteer at the library, babysit for other people’s kids, play with their little brothers and sisters and teach them lots of things. They make friends through their various activities and work hard at the things they love to do. That’s all I want for them in their lives.

In between, we talk and question everything together. My husband is forever taking them outside to look at a star, look through a telescope, look at a cloud, look at a plane overhead. We talk about the news and oil spills and coal miners stuck in mines and how to fix those problems. We watch Mythbusters on TV and lots of other documentaries – also Star Trek and the West Wing, which give us all kinds of topics to talk about. We play video games and surf for answers we don’t know on the Internet. We read historical fiction and classic novels and watch documentaries about our founding fathers. We talk about the constitution and how things are in other countries and how things used to be. We are forever interested in almost everything and we don’t need a curriculum to tell us how to learn about it.

I am so impressed by the answers my children come up with and their creative solutions to problems. More than all of it, they are people I like to be around. They are kind, unselfish, fun and smart. I would choose them as friends if they weren’t already around all of the time! I hope they can say the same about me.

Technorati Tags: education, homeschooling, unschooling

How to Make Your Own Baby Wipes

Mish — Fri, 14 May 2010 17:00:58 +0000

I recently read the book by the Duggar family and inside they share several tips, including how they make their own baby wipes. I really liked their idea and will probably use it at some point, however, I have been making my own baby wipes for quite sometime – and like mine because they are not just frugal – but also eco-friendly!

Really, it’s very simple. Just take a plastic container (an ice cream bucket works great, as does any larger Tupperware-style container) or a gallon-size Ziplock bag and fill it one-quarter full of water. You can add a little soap if you want, but I don’t.

Place 10-20 (depending on your container size) terry cloth washcloths (bar-style rags or flannel squares you have cut and hemmed yourself) into the container. Just toss in the diaper pail when finished. I like a nice large terry cloth washcloth because it gets the whole baby’s butt, even a messy one, usually in one wipe!

Voila! Baby wipes. So simple, even I can do it!

The Duggar’s tip for baby wipes is equally as simple – take a roll of Bounty paper towels (yes, Bounty – only their brand really works) and cut the roll in half with a serrated knife (be careful). Get an ice cream bucket and fill about a quarter of the way with warm water. Place the paper towel roll half into the bucket. Take out the cardboard tube after the wipes are in. Cut an ‘X’ in the lid and you can feed the towels through the top.

Presto! Baby wipes.

The Duggar version costs about $1 for 50-100 wipes. My version costs about $5 for 1,000 or more…not including water and the cost of the ice cream that was originally in the bucket! Either way, a great savings.

Technorati Tags: baby, baby wipes, cloth diapers, duggar family, homemade baby wipes, make your own baby wipes, new baby

How to Unschool A Large Family

Mish — Thu, 13 May 2010 13:14:58 +0000

“How do you homeschool so many kids?” I get this question a lot, especially when we are all at the park in the middle of the day or we go to the store and the cashier predictably says, “Is today a day off from school?”

How do I do it? How do I raise, clean up after and homeschool so many kids and still find time during the day to write a bit? Well, some days it’s not easy. Some days, the days when I feel like I need to be in control of every little thing, I do get overwhelmed. But most days, we just live and do our stuff and it all works out.

I would describe ourselves as very unschooling, especially for the younger set. However, unlike a lot of unschooling families I do require that everyone help out a bit. Now, really, I do not have my kids working overtime doing chores. But one is responsible for the kitchen counters after dinner, one does the dishes, one helps clean up toys and other “stuff” that’s been gotten out throughout the day (art supplies, science experiments, baseball gloves), and on the weekends I try and get a little deep cleaning done. Very little. I have found that usually if I’m engaged in something whether it’s dishes or gardening, someone will always come along to help. Even the teenagers. My oldest daughter who is 16 and the only one of the kids who attends a “regular” school, picked up a flat and helped me plant seeds outside one beautiful spring day. When I’m hand digging a new row, one of the boys usually brings the wagon around and puts the sod in it and takes it to the compost pile (Liam usually does this with the lawn tractor!).

I don’t have a set system of rules and a schedule for everyone because I want them to do the things they want to do. “Oh my goodness,” some people will say. “How will they ever learn to get up and go to work on time, if you let them sleep or stay up late?” Well, when a person is motivated on their own to accomplish something, they will get up for it. My oldest recently had a job at McDonald’s. He didn’t like it very much, but he liked the money and it helped him toward his goal of traveling (which he is doing now). He was unschooled through most of high school and the “worst” when it came to sleeping in and staying up late (we used to call him a vampire). But every morning, when his alarm went off at 3:30, he got up, got dressed and rode his bike to work. I didn’t have to teach him how to do that. I didn’t have to train him by making him get up every morning and trudging off to school. He did it because he knew that if he wanted to keep the job, that’s what you did.

My other older sons are 12 and 14 and each has his own thing. Liam, 12, likes to help people by mowing lawns and the like. He has only been to school for two years of his life. He is never late for anything. He didn’t have to learn that by getting up everyday. He learned it because he knows that if you’re late to something it’s rude to the people waiting for you. That’s common sense.

My 14 year old loves Tae Kwon Do. We are never late for that!

It’s crazy to think that you have to train someone everyday for 12 years of their lives to get up every morning.

But what about friends? I hear people say. Don’t they have any friends? First off, we are very fortunate to live in an area full of homeschool groups, so my children have plenty of other kids with which to play. Also, I’ve discovered two things about “socialization.” The first one is: when my kids don’t go to school they’re nicer people. Why? Well, I think the Lord of the Flies mentality at a lot of schools has a lot to do with it. When my kids are on their own they’re not ashamed to ask questions, learn things, try things or be who they are – or want to be.

The second thing is: when you put 30 or 40 or 200 kids together who are all the same age together in one room and tell them to be friends all you get is a pack mentality – not friendship. My kids join different activities – soccer, Tae Kwon Do, game groups, art classes, plays – and lots of other things. They meet people in these groups – of all ages – who are also into these things. People generally find friends in the places where they like to hang out. Friends often have like interests, they’re not friends just because they’re the same age!

So, back to the original question. How do I unschool a large family? Well, we read a lot; garden a lot; bake a lot; talk a lot; go on field trips; go to the store; build stuff; fix stuff; watch movies; play games (both video and board); talk more; ask questions; look things up. We watch stuff about science and history on TV. We play. A lot. We play all kinds of stuff. The older kids play with the younger kids. They play spies and police officers and star ships and they wrap each other up like a mummy. They ride bikes and we go to the playground.

We don’t have a set schedule, but we do have a routine. We wake up about the same time each day and we eat and I work a bit and the kids do math or play. We’ll read and go outside. We’ll eat lunch and go for a walk or to the park. We come home and work on a project. We make dinner.

Or not. Sometimes, our day doesn’t go like that at all. That’s the great thing about living and having choices, you can mix it up. I can work at night and play all day. Sometimes I wake up extra early to get my paying work done so my mom work isn’t interrupted all day.

And it doesn’t matter because everyday is our day.

Oh – and just for those who will ask, because I know they will, my well-read, unschooled kids who like taking tests (I have a couple) do EXTREMELY well on them. They are excellent readers and have liked taking math classes in addition to their musical and artistic talents. And the best thing is – they’ve never felt forced to do it!

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