#FloridaBlogger | Photo-taker | Native New Yorker | Wife, Mom to 3, Mom-Mom to 2, Pet mama to 4 cats + a 22 yr old iguana | #RealLife
I took my three kids out of school in 2004, a year after adopting them. In 2005 I created An Unschooling Life, a blog detailing our unschooling experience.
Over time, An Unschooling Life became a hub for unschooling support and advice. It has been featured in print and digital media and was home to the popular Unschooling Carnival (later known as Unschooling Voices). I’m in the process of updating and moving all the posts to this blog where they will be housed in this section.
My two daughters (ages 8 & 11) do not have a bedtime, as of about two months ago.
Let me back up a bit.
From the day that I removed my three children from school (December ’04), I’ve been unschooling them, which means we don’t do school-at-home or follow a formal curriculum. Around the time I removed them, I started reading about radical unschooling or as I’ve seen it sometimes called whole life unschooling.
When my daughter Jacqueline was seven years old, she asked if I could buy some stories that explained math. She was becoming more and more interested in how math fits into her world and had started to take notice of it in movies, TV shows and by watching my husband & I. She had a basic understanding of addition and telling time but she was more interested in math as a whole, not broken down into subjects
I’ve been a homeschooling mama since 2004 and I’ve made some “mistakes” along the way, but I always tried to look at them as a learning experience.
A representative from Redbook Magazine contacted me about a for it/against it article they were doing about unschooling. She asked if I was interested in giving my thoughts as someone who was “for it”. Of course, I said yes! Anytime I can share my experiences and thoughts on topics that are dear to me, I’m…
There was a discussion, on one of my unschooling e-mail groups, about how extended family members seem to have a hard time finding something to say to a child when they can’t ask about school. It’s like the only questions anybody can think of to ask a kid is “What grade are you in?”, “What’s your favorite subject?” and “How are you doing in school?”
If you read this blog with any frequency, you know that both of my daughters really enjoy Girl Scouts. As a matter of fact, Jacqueline (my youngest, pictured below) is a five-year girl scout, starting when she was a daisy, she’s now a junior.
One thing I appreciate about the Girl Scouts is they don’t affiliate themselves with any one religion. Although the word god is in their promise, their policy is “Since the Girl Scout organization makes no attempt to interpret or define the word ‘God’ …
