Carnival of Unschooling #4

No, it’s not your imagination, we skipped last month. There just wasn’t enough entries. But now we have a pile, so let’s see who we can visit today.

Robin of Robin’s Blue Skies submitted her Two Roads Diverged entry, and it’s a good thing too as reading her blog, I’d have a hard time just picking one entry to highlight. At any rate, this entry examines how there is more than one way for children to learn those basic facts.

Over at Tricotmania, her daughter Tigger writes a guest entry about a experiment they came up with, checking core samples of snow. Thankfully the snow is all gone, but the experience remains.

Doc writes about goal setting verses scheduling, something that unschoolers really can do! It’s not chaos all the time, sometimes it’s controlled chaos. We’re a big fan of to-do lists here as well. Sometimes kids need a litte encouraging, or a jumpstart, like examined here at Every Waking Hour. It’s not completely directionless, as these two posts help point out.

In this entry from Jeanne at Why Homeschool, one of the important points I think, is that it shows how she is willing to learn alongside the children, which is really the spirit of unschooling; that love of learning in the whole family.

If you really want to get into some of the meat of unschooling and taking your children seriously, then read Carlotta. Always a good read to get your brain cells working.

Ron had posed two questions here in a previous entry. When posed with the sentence, “Unschooling feels, sounds or appears like a good philosophy to follow, but ________ prevent me (or make me hesitant to) follow through with it.” we got some very interesting responses.

Christina laid it out simply: fear. Fear that when left to their own devices, kids would lay around all day and do nothing. Coincidentally, that same day I read her entry, I read something similar in the book Geurilla Learning on this very topic. The authors pose that the reason we are fearful of this happening is because if left to our own devices, we too would do nothing all day. But sometimes, it’s just what we need, time to recharge. And the mailing list behaviour Christina describes isn’t new to me, but saddening all the same. Like attachment parenting, unschooling isn’t a list of rules you have to follow. How ironic that some people make it so.

WJFR answered both, and in this question wonders how an organized person can unschool. Loads of interesting questions there.

Ron’s second sentence, “Unschooling my child(ren) has enabled me to see ________” brought in some really interesting responses as well.

Joanne at A Day in Our Lives laid it right out, and even changed the “has enabled” to “is enabling”, pointing out that it is a continuing and ongoing process.

Even more from Every Waking Hour, and again a stop at Carlotta’s.

There. Loads of new blogs to read if you aren’t reading them already. Also an important announcement: we’re looking for someone to take over the Carnival of Unschooling – whether independant or merged with one they are already running. If not, this will be the last one. A fun experiment while it lasted.

Note: The Carnival of Unschooling has move to Unschooling Voices.