Unschooling NYC

Here’s my favorite thing about summer trips to Indiana.  My kids get to run around on a farm for a week, ride their bikes with abandon and spend hours upon hours at a great public pool.   Today’s pool time came in at 4 hours – yesterday’s was 3 hours.   Last night the kids spent about 30 minutes racing each other on their bikes, down one hill and up another slope to one of the barns.   Fastest time?  13 seconds.

In the mornings, Ben will get up and go outside to say hello to Bear, ride his bike and get on … Read more

Today we spent a lovely afternoon at Ceraland.   Ceraland has been a fixture in the Columbus, IN area community for as long as I can remember.   CERA is an acronym for ‘Cummins Employees Recreation Area’.   The ‘Land’ part gave it flavor, and a hint of something exciting – it wasn’t Disneyland, but still.   Cummins Engine Company which at one time was the largest employer in the town (and may still be – I just don’t know), built Ceraland for its’ employees and their families.  Exclusively.

When I was a kid, there were two types of families:  those who were employed … Read more

Lest this blog become a laundry list of our activities while here in Indiana (woke up, went to Starbucks, got groceries, went to the pool….),  I will digress just a bit on Day 2 to tell you about two of the….oddest?  billboards we saw on our drive in Wednesday afternoon.   We had crossed the Indiana border and I had just subjected my kids to my traditional singing of “Back Home Again in Indiana”.   We were coming up on the exit to Cambridge City (not really a city, but a very quaint town with lots of antique shops), traveling fast on … Read more

After 12 hours on the road yesterday, a trip which just seems to get easier each time we do it, we got to my parent’s house at about 6:15pm.   In the past, our car would be filled with trash from empty fast food bags and leftover wrappings from the small travel gifts I get the kids, but recently we’ve been able to keep the chaos to a minimum.   But THIS time, for the first time EVER, we arrived and without me saying one word about it, the kids brought in all of their stuff – travel bags, suitcases, everything – … Read more

I’m in pre-trip mode tonight – we’ll be on the road around 6:30am tomorrow, so time is short.

Not to worry.   Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com spent the last 10 days in Bangladesh with Christy Turlington promoting Christy’s documentary “No Woman No Cry” about the lack of basic pre-natal and birthing care for women in many places in the world.   Here’s the link to Heather’s first post since her return:  http://www.dooce.com/2011/06/27/back-bangladesh-one-many    which you’ll need to copy and paste into your browser.  (I also recommend you look at her recent daily photos.)

And then, from Lenore Skenazy, who posted a couple of … Read more

End of the year quarterly reports are in, courtesy of the USPS, as of this morning.   This year I am really on the ball and also sent my letters of intent, my IHIP (Individualized Home Instruction Plan), which basically says, “We unschool – we can’t tell you in advance what we’ll be doing, but we’ll send in quarterly reports telling you what we’ve done” and of course Maya’s standardized test scores.   So for me there’s nothing ‘school-wise’ to do until November.   Hooray!

For Maya and Ben, of course, today’s mailing of their quarterly reports changes nothing.   They both started new … Read more

Life learning kids are more than likely also going to fall into the category of ‘Free Range Kids’ (Lenore Skenazy’s term for children whose parents actually allow them some freedom and are not overly protective or paranoid).    Part of learning to live in the world is gradually being given the trust and freedom to explore it.   There is no exact time line – each child is different.    For parents, the most important thing is to not listen to the news and believe the hype that danger lurks behind every bush and around every corner.

This becomes a much more difficult … Read more

Around 47 days ago, I wrote a  post about the love we New Yorkers have for our red-tailed hawks.    At the time, Violet, a red-tailed hawk who, along with her mate Bobby, had built a nest across from the NYU President’s office, was patiently waiting for two eggs to hatch.   But the eggs were well past their calculated incubation period.   All the experts said the eggs weren’t viable, which is not uncommon for first time nesters like Violet and Bobby.    But then a small miracle.   One of the eggs hatched, and what had been a full time nest watch, complete … Read more

Brian Andreas is one of my favorite poet/artists.   His poems are called Story People. Sometimes they are profound and very often funny.   Although the full effect can only be gotten when the words are accompanied by his illustrations, one of my favorites from him is called “Lost in Translation” and it goes like this:

“There are some days when no matter what I say it feels like I’m far away in another country and whoever is doing the translating has had far too much to drink.”

That is the perfect description of what happened today in our house when I … Read more

Trust is an integral part of children learning to be good decision makers.    If a child feels they are trusted, they will be confident enough to make their own decisions about many things.      I was looking through Sandra Dodd’s website this evening, and came upon her Principles of Unschooling.    Two that stood out to me were:  1)  Let go of learning as a focus, a concern, an issue – trust that it happens.   2)  Let go of control of your child – trust that they know what they need.    Some examples:  no chores, no bedtimes, no eating controls, no limits … Read more