The Official Room of Learning

Many homeschoolers have their own "classroom" set aside at home, others have desks in a corner, or the ubiquitous kitchen table. Here at Chez BlueSkies, we have the bathroom. Yep, apparently, that's our official room of learning. I find the darndest things in there. Of course, there has always been DH's magazine rack and lately stacks of books, my daughter's plastic horses with their brushes and accoutrements, occasionally a tupperware bowl full of water with some bits of nature, sponges, shells, tinfoil boats, or other flotsam in it, and a Spiderman comic book or two. But this week, I've been finding ever-more-interesting items every time I use the bathroom. A globe, propped in front of the toilet after my daughter disappeared in there for half an hour or so ("I was bored while I was going potty and just wanted to look at some places"); a metronome and a kitchen timer; a stack of grid paper, filled in with numbers and strange symbols, obviously some coded device of my son's; and a large magnifying glass (I won't ask exactly what it was being used to examine, perhaps I don't want to know).

So in our household, you won't find children sitting neatly at the dining room table filling in their workbooks. But if the bathroom door is closed, that's where the real learning action is apparently to be found.

Six Acres of Books, Five Waterfalls, Four Rainstorms, Three Monuments, Two Trips to the Science Museum, One Sick Dog and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

My husband was in a wedding this weekend at a fancy place in the Columbia River Gorge, so the kids and I took the opportunity to hang out in Portland and the Gorge area for a couple of days. When in Portland, it's hard to pass up Powell's City of Books . You just can't beat a bookstore so large that you get a map for when you walk in the door, especially as a homeschooler. I did emphasize that the budget was only there for a couple of books each, so the kids enjoyed agonizing over the many choices for an hour or so, plus they each bought a blank journal to write in on our travels. I got a book on training for the Ironman, that I am alternately thrilled and terrified to start reading (5.5 months and counting until race day).

OMSI now has a robotics exhibit open, and that was great fun, especially for my robotically-fascinated 9 y.o., but going to OMSI on a Saturday and Sunday reminded us of why Homeschooling Is Awesome! We've never been there before when it was so crowded, and after an hour or so in the zoo-like atmosphere, we were ready to bail.

So we took a drive up the old Columbia Gorge highway, to many fabulous waterfalls both big and small. With all of the rain this week, Multnomah Falls was in full roar and looking very impressive at 620 feet tall. We oohed and aahed appropriately. But some of the smaller ones, like Wahkeena Falls were beautiful in their lush greenness and swirling white water, much different from the warmer months later in the year when they are reduced to more of a trickle. Along the way, our dog got sick (repeatedly) from the hotel food scraps we gave him as a breakfast treat, and it alternately poured rain on us and broke out in lovely bursts of sun.

We got lost in the terrible signage of the old Highway, but not before a visit to the recently restored Vista House treated us to its lovely views out over the Gorge. An hour late in picking up DH, we finally staggered into our favorite Portland cheap eats, the Old Spaghetti Factory at around 8:30 pm. Home by 11:00 and the kids and I were all snoozing nicely with poor DH left to drive all by himself.

Run Away When They Say Learning Is Fun

The kids and I and a friend of theirs went to a local amusement park on a homeschooling "field trip" set up by someone who got a group discount for us. When we arrived, the amusement park had provided us with the standard things they hand out to school groups, complete with an activity book titled, in bold capital letters, "LEARNING IS FUN".

The reactions of my kids and their friend was priceless. As the lady handed us the book and they saw the cover, they recoiled in mock pseudo-horror. "Acccck! Run Away!"

"What is it?" the lady asked.

"Well," my son answered, "we've discovered that any time someone tells you that learning is fun, they're trying to get you to learn something you really didn't want to know in the first place."

"But this book is full of facts and information about the rides and fairy tales," the lady replied.

"Yes, I'm sure it is," my son went on. "And I might be interested in that stuff. But then again, I might not be. If I was interested in it, and I had a guidebook as a resource, that would be great. But if I'm not interested in it and someone was trying to make me be interested, then they would tell me that "Learning is Fun" to get me to try to be interested. If someone is trying hard to sell you something, it's probably because you wouldn't want it or don't need it in the first place. The thing is, I know that learning is fun already, because I like to learn things."

"Oh, okay," the lady said, with a somewhat bewildered expression on her face. I'm sure she had never received this sort of discourse on the "Learning is Fun" packet before. After the kids had run off to the gift shop, she said "Well, your son certainly is articulate about what he does and doesn't like. I'm sure you want to take this packet anyways so the kids can learn this stuff."

I had to LOL because even after such a great explanation, most people still don't get that kids don't have to be forced to learn. I did take the packets, because it had lots of coloring pages which my youngest has enjoyed. And after going on all the fairy-tale themed rides, the kids did ask me to check out a copy of Grimm's from the library so we could catch up on the fairy tales we haven't read yet. And they wanted to look up the history of some of the more bizarre rhymes like "Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater" on the internet when we got home. Unfortunately, none of that was covered in the packet, which focused more on things like finding which ride started with the letter "A".

But even without the informative packet, we had a great time on the rides, in the bumper cars and wild west shooting gallery, the mazes and the fairy tale land. Yep. LEARNING IS FUN.

Teacher, Can You Help Me?

We had a blast the other day. Forty-two of us homeschoolers from our local group took the train to Portland and enjoyed a day there (BTW, Amtrak gives discounts for school groups that are quite substantial, and homeschooling groups can qualify). My kids and I went to the science center, OMSI, with a bunch of our friends. At one point, all of the older kids were in one of the big experiment rooms and I took my youngest (6) up to the "Science Playground" for littler kids. It reminded me a lot of the days I took my oldest (now 9.5) before his little sister was born and he played with the water and sand rooms and the playdough and such.

They have one room in the Science Playground that is used for arts, crafts, and messy stuff, and they had a whole slime table with bunches of that Borax goo and all kinds of things to chop, squeeze, roll, and cut it. We sat at the table for quite a while and made snakes, pizzas, and "cookies" out of slime. I stood up and tried to see how long I could stretch it (about 6 feet) before it would break. All of the other kids at the table were joining in and we had a great time.

A funny thing happened though. The other kids at the table started calling me "teacher". I guess it was because I was sitting at the table and interacting with them. The other moms were sitting around various benches at the edge of the room. One on a cell phone, one with a book, one with some knitting, another nursing a baby. Other than the one with the baby (understandably not interacting with her oldest at the moment), none of the other moms were engaging with their kids. I found it monumentally sad that the kids would make the immediate assumption that anyone interacting with them was hired to do so.

After one little boy said "Teacher, can you help me make a snake?" and I did, I told him that I wasn't a teacher. "Well, what are you then?" he asked. "I'm her mom", I said, pointing to my daughter. His face lit up and he ran over and tugged on his mom's arm. "Mom, can you come sit with me and make snakes?". "After I make these phone calls," was the answer. When we left a half hour later, I was still helping him with his snakes and pancakes.

I think one of the dangers of the early childhood push into preschools (don't let me get started on my rant about how many of the parents call them "schools" as in "Johnny did so well at school today!" when little Johnny is 3 years old) is this phenomenon. When one pays professionals to interact with their children, it can lead to a detachment and inability to connect and interact during the times that the parents are with their children. Children start to assume that an adult sitting with them and interacting with them is a paid professional. And before anyone comes shouting at me, I know that every mom has her moments where she is not 1-1 with the kids. I've been the mom at the playground with my cel phone out, pushing the swing with one hand. But it's when it becomes prevalent to the point where the kids don't even expect their parents to take an interest in what they're doing that it makes me sad.

I was sorry to walk away from that table of kids who were having so much fun with me. I was sorry that their parents had more important things to do (seemingly on a regular basis) than to get down and make slime pizzas with their kids. I think that our society would benefit from anything that encourages parents and children to interact more, not less.

I used to not understand why people would say they were "homeschooling" when their kids were only 3 or 4 years old. Now with the overwhelming numbers of kids this age going to "school", I get why it can be necessary.

Forget the Carnival, Come to the Country Fair!

The Homeschool Country Fair that is, a new spot for a homeschooling "carnival" that isn't linked to support of the right-wing Christian agenda (including pro-spanking sites) like HomeschoolBlogger has been.

Here's some more information about why many homeschoolers are refusing to use or link to HomeschoolBlogger.

Beam Me Up, Beowulf

One of the things that I love most about unschooling is all the cool and wonderful connections that are made in the interactions of daily life, the way one thing leads to another until you've followed a path of interesting things to some new and exciting place.

This week, it was an episode of Star Trek that led us to Beowulf, which led us to the linguistic studies of J.R.R. Tolkien, which led to a discussion of how languages form, which led to looking up the story of the Tower of Babel, which led us to research whether or not the Tower of Babel actually existed someplace, which led to a discussion of ziggurats vs. pyramids, which will lead who knows where...

It all started with an episode of Star Trek Voyager in which some of the characters are trapped in the Holodeck in a reinactment of Beowulf in which Grendel actually turns out to be an incarnation of a life form made of photonic energy (someone with a good imagination or some really good drugs thinks up these plots.) In any case, we are now reading Beowulf as a bedtime story. We might not be taking the linear path: Little Red Riding Hood leads to Frog and Toad, which leads to Harry Potter, and sometime when you hit college you might get to Beowulf (unless you encounter it in a high school AP English class, at which point you may or may not be interested in what it has to offer). But the path we're taking is always engaging and fascinating, always relevant, and always feels like an exciting adventure through the accumulated knowledge of the universe. Who knows where we'll go tomorrow?

305,251,200 Seconds of Unschooling

Give or take a few... It also could be expressed as 5087520 minutes, 84792 hours, or 3533 days since my son was born 9 3/4 years ago until today. Unschooling doesn't really stop or start at any given time, like the date a child would've gone to preschool or kindergarten or 1st grade, or the first day they would've been compelled by law to go to school (2nd grade in our state). It's an unbroken stream of life and learning, going back to that first amazing moment of birth. More likely, it starts before that as each of my kids clearly came out knowing some things. M., whose favorite song in utero was always "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad", loves that song to this day, and had an amazing run of years of being a total railroad nut (even going so far at age 2 and 3 as to call himself Casey Jones and only allow people to refer to him as such). A. turned to her brother's voice as soon as he spoke after her birth. She clearly related so much more to his voice than to anyone else's, probably because his head was about belly-level while I was pregnant with her, and he used to talk to her, calling her "my little strawberry".

From some moment of cognitive spark in utero until today, they've been learning all the time. Today is yet another sunny wonder in a string of unbroken lovely days. I even had to water my nascent vegetable garden today, which is unusual for April in the often-wet Pacific Northwest. We had A.'s theatre group this morning, then home for a brief lunch and off to M.'s homeschool writer's group (which he started almost 4 years ago now!). M. read the latest installment in the SciFi chapter book he's been writing, and A. read a short piece about how much she loves Canada Geese. Too cute. After that to the park with our friends, then home with a few more friends. They've been playing outside and I've been gardening.

Another day of joy. Another day of learning, friends, life, fun, excitement, accomplishment. Another 24 hours, or 1440 minutes, or 86400 seconds of learning in freedom. Our lives are blessed.

What If Everything We Thought Kids Needed To Know Was Wrong?

Peak Oil...Oh, I know that the general public doesn't believe it yet - although this month's mainstream magazine articles might be bringing it to a nearer spot on their dim horizons. As America in particular and the world in general marches resolutely toward the edge of a cliff, maybe we collectively think if we just pretend that the edge isn't there we won't fall off of it. Or maybe there's some magic ledge, just a couple feet below that we can land on - solar power, maybe, or the wonders of hydrogen. In the meantime, we should certainly make sure our children know what the capital of Venezuela is and what year the Louisiana Purchase was made and how to spell pseudonym, because this stuff will certainly be important in the future, somewhere on that ledge, right?

What if everything we believed about the future is wrong? What if a small piece of land with sunshine and rain that can grow a family's worth of food will be worth more than all the gold in Fort Knox? What if knowing how to defeat a cabbage maggot or potato beetle will be more important than having an MBA from Harvard or a Law degree from Yale? What if the ability to repair a windmill will be more crucial than being able to do 100 math facts in under 10 minutes? What if the ability to cooperate will surpass our cultural need to compete for everything from grades to football scores?

Self-sufficiency, old-fashioned know-how, cooperative endeavors, the ability to make do, food preservation, bartering, self-powered transport, communication, conflict resolution - these skills may trump anything children are learning in school today. And yet we, as a culture, send our children to school as if tomorrow will be exactly the same as today. As if they need to know the same things that we did at their age. As if what they're learning today will help them in a future that is fast approaching, one we can hardly predict.

As we head toward what James Howard Kunstler calls "The Long Emergency", I'm grateful for our unschooling life. A life in which my kids can spend their days in the garden, baking bread, cycling to the library, walking to the farmer's market, researching how to build our own windmill, learning how to repair bicycles, as well as learning all of the accoutrements of the new millenium (computers and whatnot) which may, or may not exist in the tomorrows to come.

Synchronicity

This week, almost simultaneously, two very disparate things were posted on two lists/boards that I am a member of, and the contrast could not have been more startling if they had been planted there on purpose.

On a very open-ended "alternative" parenting board, a mom posted about how no matter how kids are raised (Christian, not Christian, public school, private, homeschooled), they all do "the same shit" and their parents have to "deal with the same crap" (essentially, kids sneaking around, going out with their parents' knowledge, drinking, smoking, getting into trouble).

Meanwhile, on a list of unschooling parents, there has been a very inspiring thread about how wonderful their teens are. How they respect themselves, their parents, their friends, their siblings. How close they are to their parents, how responsible, content, thankful, and joyful they are. How the parents feel that their teenagers are their "bestest friends".

There's a great big ol' myth out there in our culture, and it is this: no matter how you raise your kids, as teens they will raise hell. Unschooling puts lie to this myth. Why? Because whether kids are Christian or not Christian, schooled in public, private, or homeschooled, if their relationship with their parents is one of submission to an authority over their lives, rebellion is a likely outcome. On top of this, throw school into the mix - whether it's six hours a day of various teachers and classes telling you what and how to learn, or whether it's your mother at the kitchen table telling you how to learn - and you have a veritable recipe for disaster.

Teenagers' lives are full of transition, change, massive amounts of energy, overwhelming emotions - these things are true. Give them a cage to rattle and they will certainly pound those bars hard, trying to determine if there's a chink or a gap anywhere. When they're told what, how, where, how much, and why to do or not do things their whole lives, then when they get to the age where they're clever enough and independent enough to sneak around and get into some serious trouble, it's a good likelihood that they will do so. But what happens with teenagers who are raised with respect for their opinions since childhood? With kids whose ideas about themselves and their preferences and their direction in life are entirely determined by themselves? They still have the energy, emotions, and drive of every other teen, but it can be used to further whatever their life's passions happen to be. I think about the incredible amounts of energy I wasted on anger as a teen - rattling that cage and rattling it hard - what could I have accomplished with that energy and drive if it was my own to use as I wished?

Today and every day, I am building the relationship with my kids that will sustain us through the teenage years and beyond. I will listen to their hopes and dreams, and try to help make them happen. If those dreams include video games I don't care for, hobbies I'm not interested in, a hairdo that makes me cringe, or music I'd rather not listen to, I will enter into their worlds until I see these things as they do: see how cool and enveloping it is to play that video game, how fun that hobby is, how freeing that hairdo, how that music has layers and textures and a message I didn't hear on the first listening. My kids will spend their energy, their drive, and their emotion on things that are meaningful to them, today and every day.

And so I can honestly say as I look to the future, to the teen years: I'm looking forward to them.

The View from 40

I am blessed. Really, totally blessed. I love my DH, my kids, our life together I am blessed with wonderful friends and family in my life. I am so lucky to live in a beautiful home, a beautiful city, a beautiful state. The sun is shining outside. I'm going to be able to go on a bike ride today. My DH has said I can pick out a digital SLR camera for my birthday (and anyone who knows my extreme shutterbug-ism knows how over-the-top happy I am about this!) This weekend my friends and family are going to gather with me to celebrate. No day could be better than today.

It's my birthday, I'm 40 years old. Wow!

Don't Mess With Mother Nature

I think I might've jinxed myself with that Cat in the Hat post. It has now rained for 10 straight days. The same days that my husband has been out of town, leaving introverted, need-my-quiet-time me to fend for myself with both energetic kids and no outdoor run-around time. Wow. So far, though, we've managed to keep busy and have fun (laughed our heads off at Hoodwinked yesterday, went to the gym the day before, friends' house the day before that, etc.), but the weather is getting a bit wearing. We just put in our garden, too, but haven't been able to do much outside except in between rain showers.

So today, the dreaded "B" word finally surfaced: "I'm bored!". Mind you, I don't think boredom is necessarily a bad thing. It's a time to dig deep and get inventive and we can almost always find something fun to do.

But today, even I am standing open-jawed in amazement. My kids have decided to clean each other's rooms. Just for the fun of it. They're happily shouting up and down the stairs to each other "Come look at it now! See how I've organized all your beads!", "Hey, check out where I put your card collection!". I'm either the total freaking Mother of the Year or the axe is about to fall, or both. Only time will tell...

No One Advertises Unschooling

This is a direct quote from a magazine ad for the Cayman Islands in a travel mag:

"I brought a little boy and went home with a lifelong buddy

When I took my 8-year-old son to the Cayman Islands, I thought he'd probably just play in the sand while I kicked back and caught up on some reading. Then we went kayaking. Then we went snorkeling. Then we went hiking. Then we went fishing. By trip's end, we'd done more together in five days than we had in the past five years." (italics mine)

Wow, how sad is that? It doesn't take a fancy vacation to connect with your kids. If you've only spent five days worth of time together in five years, it's time for a reality check. But how indicative of American life is this ad? Sadly, I'd bet it is all too true for too many parents and children. When lives go from before-school care to school to after-school care or sports or structured activities, there's very little time for just kicking back and getting to know one another.

No one takes out glossy full-color magazine ads for unschooling. Maybe if they did, it would read this way:

"I brought home a little boy and within weeks I had a lifelong buddy

When I took my 8-year-old son out of school, I thought he'd probably just do some workbooks while I kicked back and caught up on some reading. Then we went out in yard and kicked some piles of leaves. Then we went snail-watching. Then we went hiking. Then we played a game together. By week's end, we'd done more together in five days than we had in the past five years."

There's no corpporation to profit from such an ad, no tourist councils, no resorts. But that doesn't change the truth of it. Letting go of schoolish expectations is a vacation of the mind. Bon Voyage!

Fun With Standardized Testing

I learned a long time ago not to be surprised by the things my kids find interesting (that time on that car trip to Yorkshire where they begged me to write out times tables for them to fill in springs to mind), but this week takes the cake. I never thought I'd hear "These test things are fun. Can we get some more of them to do?" My own memories of the SAT testing I went through in school was a mixture of terror, boredom, and agony. But my kids think the SATs are fun.

I should back up and explain. It's not like I got these crazy SAT practice books because I wanted to. But the state I live in mandates that all kids get tested in their 3rd grade year, and we don't have an option for portfolios, observation, or any of the other possibilities that other states offer. So, my oldest will have to be tested next month, no way around it. I wanted him to have the option to try some practice tests first, so he'd at least know how to fill in little bubbles with No. 2 pencils (you know, another one of those valuable life skills that you use so much once you're done with school). He said he'd like to see a practice test or two, to become familiar with the format, so I bought some. And the kids love them.

It's funny. When you take something, even something as dreadful as testing, and you remove the expectations, the grading, the pressure, the concern, the caring about how you score, and all of the attendant angst that goes along with those things, they are, apparently, fun. Last night, my kids begged to do more and more pages, long after I had grown weary of checking the answer sheets. My "kindergarten-aged child" (put in quotes because really, these distinctions are so meaningless to all but the state beauracracy) even did the 3rd grade test, with her brother looking over her shoulder and coaching her on which answers the test-makers put in to trick her. They had some good laughs together over the alternative answers and spent some time thinking up their own for several of the questions.

So now my few concerns about my kids and test taking have been laid to rest (these concerns consisted of them being able to just follow the format of a test, not having a lifetime of test-taking to practice with, and tracking the bubbles correctly so as not to fill out an entire row of accidentally wrong answers), but more than anything I've learned another lesson along the unschooling path. As I released all of the anxiety that came churning up from my distant schooling past when I looked at those bubble sheets and No. 2 pencils, I could see these tests for what they are to my kids: a bit of a fun brain teaser, an opportunity to learn some new things (what a long division symbol looks like, what does the word antonym mean), and a fun diversion on a rainy day. Nothing more and nothing less. All else is the world of expectations that are normally tied to those little bubbles. Without that, they're just one more fun thing in a vast sea of living and learning. On to tomorrow's adventures.

The Only True Law

Speaking of Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, here's one of my favorite quotes from the book:

=========
He spoke of very simple things--that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form."
"Set aside," came a voice from the multitude, "even if it be the Law of the Flock?"
"The only true law is that which leads to freedom," Jonoathan said. "There is no other."
=========

Replace gulls with people, and flying with learning, the Flock with society, and you have unschooling in a nutshell. It is our very nature to learn in freedom, and to allow our children to do that, we have to be prepared to put all our former schoolish notions and the superstitions of society aside. The only true law is that which leads to freedom.

On Our Bookshelf

Books we've really enjoyed recently:

Kids: Toad Rage by Morris Gleitzman - This is one of the best kids' chapter books I've heard in years. I happened on to it at the library one day, as a book on CD (read by the author) and we took it on a recent 2.5 hour road trip. It was perfect. We laughed our heads off. It's a perfect mix of humor, story, adventure, pathos. An incredibly enjoyable book for kids and adults. I can't wait to check out the other books this author has written.

Jonathan Livinston Seagull - this is our nighttime read-aloud book for the last few nights. It's a short read and a bit "deep", it has enough story for the kids and enough philosophy for me to be content.

The Amazing Miss A (age 6): Books by Ellen Stoll Walsh, like Mouse Paint and Hamsters to the Rescue. The illustrations in this book are adorable, with simple-enough text that she can read them herself.

Magnificent Mr. M (age 9): The Roman Mysteries series by Caroline Lawrence. A set of older-kid level chapter books set in Roman times. Current favorite is The Pirates of Pompeii.

Me: Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America
by Mark Perry. A fascinating bio of two of America's more interesting people, and the story of their unusual friendship. Very good so far.

DH: ChiRunning A book about a totally new and different running style based on the principles of Tai Chi

Spring Break for an Unschooler

Spring Break is kind of an oxymoron when you're unschooling. "Hey, let's take a break from doing all the cool things we love doing!" and do what instead?

Well, we did take a bit of a break since most of the class-type things the kids have been doing were cancelled this week (horseback lessons, etc.) and went back to my hometown to visit with my mom and dad. Of course, we still had a load of fun adventures - my uncle sent up a boxload of lemons from his trees and my mom has all these antique citrus squeezers so we made homemade lemonade. My dad had a big oak tree fall on his property and it had an enormous honeybee nest inside (like on Winnie the Pooh and the Hunny Tree) that the bees abandoned when it fell, so we could clearly see all the honeycombs they had built inside. Very cool! We rode horses, went to the science museum (remind me never to do that on spring break again, I forget how crowded those places get), DD played her violin at a nursing home where a 91 year old former violin maker resides who loves to hear her play. We also got to eat some great BBQ from a stand that my dad and step-bro started up (if you're ever in Medford, OR, be sure to visit the Smoke-n-man!. )

Come to think of it, that's one of the things I value most about my own parents - they've never stopped learning, living, following their passions. My dad has always loved to cook (his dad owned a restaurant, so maybe it's in the blood), and in his 70's decided to have a BBQ wagon made and took it around to fairs and festivals all last summer. My mom owns her own business selling hearing aids, following her own interests, and also loves to hike, kayak, and camp. That's one of the things I love best about DH's and my lives too, we've always followed our passions and our living (financial) came from that. I hope the same for my kids, that they never have to "settle" for a dull drudging job that they hate.

So many times, I've heard that used as a justification for school: that we need to prepare kids for the boring years of work ahead of them by making sure they know how to endure endless hours of things that they don't like doing now. Personally, I've never understood that argument. In the first case, if their working lives truly are going to be filled with boring drudgery, it would make more sense to let them enjoy a wonderful childhood now, when they don't have to work. Secondly, why should we aspire to lives of boring drudgery? What would the world look like if we all worked at things we loved? Whether that's selling BBQ or hearing aids or programming robots or being a musician. Surely the world is a big enough place for us all to have joy-filled working lives.

When spring break doesn't have to mean a break from anything, you know that every day is filled with the things that matter most.

Aspiring To Be The Cat in the Hat

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was, of course, The Cat in the Hat. The rhyming, the wonderful illustrations, and especially the mischievous Cat who helps the kids of the story have so much fun when their mother is out. All of that was very appealing to me as a child.

So of course we have the book on one of our bookshelves, and I've read it to the kids a dozen or so times. One day, when my oldest was about five or six, he said "Mom, you're more like the Cat in the Hat than the mother in the story. Our house is always fun!"

Now I'll make it clear that I can't juggle live fish and I don't think we've ever tried to fly a kite in the house (though I wouldn't put it past anyone), my children aren't quite like Thing1 and Thing2, and I most unfortunately don't have a three-handled, moss-covered family credenza that can clean up the entire house in three minutes flat (anyone who has a line on where to buy one can please email me immediately). But I do know about having fun, and our house has always been a place where we don't have to sit around just because it is cold and rainy outside. There's always something to do. We've ridden basket lids down our stairs on days that we would really love to go sledding but there's no snow, made an incredibly messy and only partially successful attempt at baking and frosting our own petit fours when my son loved the ones at the bakery so much that he wanted to make some himself, created obstacle courses in the house, camped out in a tent in the living room, learned to juggle (with balls, not fish, mind you), created a space station out of boxes, bounced from trampoline to bed and back again. And of course all the usual stuff: movies, games, puzzles, books, puppets, toys, etc.

Anne Ohman, an unschooling mom whom I really admire has made up bumper stickers with her quote: "How can I connect with my children today, expand their worlds, bring joy into their lives, nurture and encourage what they love to do?" That is such a wonderful and world-expanding idea that I printed it out to carry with me, along with one of her other mantras: "Choose Joy".

Yes, choose joy, and a life so wonderful that your kids don't really understand why the kids in The Cat in the Hat could possibly not have anything to do if they were at home - the greatest place on earth.

What Did We Do Today?

At the end of each day, after I've read to the kids from our chapter book, when we're all nice and snuggled up together, we have a special ritual. I ask "What did we do today?" and we start with waking up and talk through our entire day. Each person puts in parts that they remember, or talks about their most favorite things. It never ceases to amaze me. Even on days when I might think "We hardly did anything at all today", this wealth of living pours out: the joyful interwoven fabric of our lives together.

The connections made through living often seem small and insignifigant in the moment, but when viewed from above they weave a tapestry that ties all life and learning together. Yesterday, we sang "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" in Latin. Today, we're watching a movie in which someone falls to their knees in a church and crosses themselves. The kids ask me what they are doing and I tell them it is called "genuflecting" and explain a bit about the Catholic tradition. My daughter pipes up that "genuflect" probably comes from the Latin "genu" for "knee", which we learned in the song from yesterday. That's a connection I have never made before, it's a small but exciting discovery - a tying together of knowledge, the history of our language. That morphed into a discussion of how the Catholic church kept Latin alive long after people stopped speaking it conversationally.

Another connection: the side of a Gatorade bottle lists ingredients using their elemental names: K, Na, H2O, CHO. The kids are curious and so we print out a periodic table of the elements and put it on the wall. We look up the elements in Gatorade and also try to find all the elements that we recognize. The kids are especially amused that Krypton is real, they thought it was invented in the Superman comics.

How yeast works, what makes sourdough sour, baking our own bread, looking at formulas for generating electricity from a wind turbine, what does E=Mc2 mean, how do you spell "pirate" and why isn't it pronounced to rhyme with "irate", playing music together, reading, watching the movie Zorro, discussing Santa Anna and how California became a state, tying him in to the other stories we know about him like the Alamo, and how Texas became a state, looking up the order in which the states joined the Union... these are some of the many things we did today, a day in which it could be said "we just hung out at home together, nothing much happened."

Out of such days, such moments, the threads of learning are woven through our lives together. A connection here, a connection there - a book, a movie, a puzzle, a game, a comment, a song. Knowledge of the world that comes through joyous interaction with life itself.

What will we do today?

Never Underestimate a Determined Chicken
or
The Pull of Freedom

The past year could be subtitled "Adventures With Chickens". Our chickens even graced our Christmas letter this year, festively adorned with Santa hats. A year ago in March, we went to our local Feed-n-Seed store for some guinea pig supplies and ended up coming home with six fluffy and adorable peeping chicks. They lived in our garage for awhile, then in a mobile "chicken tractor" in the backyard, and eventually my DH built them "The Poultry Palace", a lovely shed on our back property with perches and nesting boxes and a big fenced yard - all a chicken could want or need. One would think.

The chickens think otherwise. They'd like to come into our backyard, scratch through all of our bark mulch, scatter it over 90% of our lawn (killing the grass in the process), tear up the black weed barrier underneath and scatter shreds of that everywhere, basically turning a landscaped back yard into a scene of utter destruction. Then they'd love to move on to the front yard, our neighbor's gardens, vegetable plots, and beyond. They're amazingly adept at outsmarting me, squeezing through the tiniest chink in the fence, or lately they've taken to scratching at the ground underneath the fence until they've made a hollow big enough to crawl through. I've piled up our brush clippings into these hollows as a stop-gap measure, but they'll patiently peck at them until they've hauled all the branches out and gotten through. It's impressive, really. A creature with a brain the size of a pea, a creature completely capable of living almost the same existence with no head as they lived with one (see Mike the Headless Chicken if you don't believe me). That such a creature keeps outsmarting me... well, it's a bit embarassing.

But of course, they will never give up. Even though they've got a big fenced area with everything they'd ever need inside it, it's still a cage and freedom waits beyond it. The drive for freedom is huge. So many of the world's big events have turned on it. From Masada to Captain Jack's Modoc holdout, the American Revolution, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, people throughout history have fought dearly for their freedom.

So when people talk of school reform - of how better computers or higher teacher pay or newer buildings or different curriculums will solve the current problems of our "educational" system, I think that they're missing the essential lesson that all peoples who have tried to hold others in subjugation have learned. Without freedom, even the most lush and beautiful reservation would be a prison. Without freedom, even if East Berlin was the most wonderful city on earth, it would've been a prison. A person (or even a chicken!) who is imprisoned bends their thoughts toward freedom, and that bending precludes most of what could be taught or learned if that freedom was theirs. When children learn in freedom, their lives and their learning belongs to them and they cherish and nurture that learning. Nothing gets in the way.

Our chickens will spend all day plucking away at the brush that plugs the holes separating them from the rest of the world outside their fence. Even if that means they spend less time doing the more important tasks of finding bugs and worms to eat. The freedom is too tantalizing, too distracting to ignore.

I wish I could give our chickens the freedom to explore the whole world (without sacrificing our neighbors' gardens). Thankfully, that's a gift we can give our children.

Unschooling: The Gift of Mindful Living

People in our western culture are searching. Yoga mats are on sale at Target, Thich Nhat Hanh sells out books and lecture halls, magazines with names like "Simple Living" and "Organic Style" fly off the racks. As a culture, we are seeking mindfulness, the ability to live in the moment, to fully embrace life.

Yet, this is the very thing we steal from our children.

Our children are born mindful. They know with every fibre of their being how to live in the moment. They know how to feel deeply, express their true emotions. They are in touch with their inner child. They still are their inner child. How is it then, that we turn them into us? Into people who need rubber mats and breathing instruction, insightful monks, and magazine articles to figure out what our children already know?

Yes, we take our children, living mindfully in the moment, and we force them to turn outwards, away from what they know is true and right. We put their minds to chopped-up subjects like "math" and "history", divorced from the real world, we prepare them for future "tests", and we place them in environments so mentally confining that they begin to distinguish among themselves on minutae - what brand of jeans someone is wearing, what kind of car their parent drives.

Some of us do this intentionally. Without a constant stream of willing consumers coming out of our system, our economic house of cards might just collapse. Some of us prey on this system, selling everything from designer purses to tooth whiteners to people who have lost the ability to focus here, in this moment, on what is truly important.

But most of us do this unintentionally. It was done to us, we perpetuate it on our kids. Even as we seek to regain our own internal compass, we are removing our childrens' compasses from them.

Unschooling is a gift. It's a gift of wholeness, of mindfulness, of a child's birthright to continue to live according to their own internal compass, to not be forced off course to waters so far and strange that they may never find their way back. Unschooling lets them retain what is rightfully theirs, an ability so spectacular that most of us only glimpse it in small, brilliant bursts throughout our lives. The ability to live, right here and right now. The ability to believe that what is in one's heart is true and right. The ability to focus on what is meaningful and important. The ability to follow one's heart. Unschooling is a gift, and I am grateful.