The Expanding Life

I love blog carnivals, and the Carnival of Homeschooling is very special to me because it’s the first blog carnival I ever met. We hit it off right away and have been friends for years now. This week’s edition is at Sprittibee, and here are my favorite entries:

• Growing Wild is a fascinating read for two reasons: 1) it describes a life that, geographically, is probably unlike your own, and 2) it describes a life that, philosophically, is probably a lot like your own. Please check it out and see what I mean.
• Sheltering and Weird Homeschoolers proves that there is always room for yet another take on the homeschooling/socialization issue. Here’s a sample: “There is . . . not much in the allegedly ‘real’ word that resembles public school. In public school if you are being harassed or bullied you do not have the option of calling the police, or just getting up and walking away.”
• 15 Delightful Summertime Stories tells you about fifteen places you and your child can go to find joy, and they’re all in the library.

Happy reading.

Go to life, not school.

This is going to be the last carnival for a while—maybe a long while. Thanks to the confidence I’ve gained from living the unschooled life with my daughter, I’m embarking on a new project. I’ll keep you posted about it here on the blog. For now, I’ll just say that the determination, sense of purpose, and self-discipline I see in Stephanie have inspired me to do something I’ve had in my head for twenty-five years. I’m going to write a book (not about unschooling) and if I can write half as well as my daughter can, I’ll consider myself lucky.

So, without further ado, here is the final (for a while) edition of the Carnival of Unschooled Life. Enjoy!

Life at Home

Jen at Best Family Adventures presents When Homeschoolers Go Unsupervised.

Creating Nirvana describes Homeschooling on a Rainy Day.

Out in the World

Christina Pilkington at An Eclectic Odyssey offers Fall Hikes.

Inspirations

I’ve been inspired by a friend of mine, who has recently taken her act on the road, speaking to groups of parents about how unschooling has helped her son blossom. We all don’t have the opportunity to give speeches at education fairs, but most of us have a chance to talk about our life choices to neighbors, friends, or relatives. Just a simple declaration (“We encourage our children to spend as much time as they want to, doing the things they love to do.”) can plant a seed for acceptance of unschooling in the world.

Dark Nights of the Soul

They don’t help you, or your child, or the world. So, when you’re having one, imagine yourself flipping on a light switch and, in that light, taking a positive action that will help you, or your child, or the world—preferably all three!

Encounters of the School-y Kind

It’s always something. Today it this article in the New York Times about kids “being groomed as athletes before they can walk.” Just the other day, I saw a six-year-old who looked very tired, because he had played soccer on two different teams that day. Two games in one day. He’s six. He didn’t look “sleepy” tired. He looked “overburdened” tired. No one needs to be overburdened, especially not children.

Beginnings

Jessica at Bohemian Bowmans declares That’s stupid. So I’m not going to do it anymore. I absolutely love this post.

Passages

I’m about to pass through a door that’s been waiting for me, half open, for many, many years. There must be a door waiting for you, too.

Miscellaneous

Cristina at Home Spun Juggling offers Happy (Learning) Days.

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My deepest thanks to everyone who contributes and everyone who reads this for supporting The Carnival of Unschooled Life. Words are beams of light. Let’s continue to shine them on the things we believe in.

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There is no future edition of the carnival scheduled at this time.

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Live, laugh, play, learn, talk, walk, hug, dance, sing, and shine—until we meet again.

Go to life, not school.

As we enter the holiday-filled time of the year, let’s celebrate that we are living in the spirit of freedom and curiosity that unschooling brings. No construction-paper leaves stapled to corkboards three feet above our heads, unless we want ‘em. Real, live leaf-crunching walks in the brisk, chilly air any time of day or night.

I hope you enjoy this month’s carnival.

Life at Home

Pamela at Blah, Blah, Blog presents Play, Play, Play All Day.

Out in the World

Laura Grace Weldon at Relentless Optimism writes about When Girls Think Their Looks Mean Everything.

Carrie Oakley lists 100 Awesome Blogs for Roadschoolers at Online Colleges. This carnival normally rejects “list posts” in favor of personal insights from actual unschoolers, but every rule needs an exception. Carrie’s list contains blogs you might find useful or just plain fun.

Inspirations

Steven at The Emotion Machine presents Your Own Self-Directed Graduate Program.

Karen at The Stone Age Techie points out The Intersection of Math and Art.

Dark Nights of the Soul

Pamela at Blah, Blah, Blog declares Enough with the Dire Predictions.

Encounters of the School-y Kind

Idzie at I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write. presents The Need for Schooling, in which she states “No one *needs* schooling!”

Cristina at Home Spun Juggling tells about doing some Unschool-y Accounting.

Beginnings

Ingalls Homestead, DeSmet, SD

Passages

Idzie at I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write. offers Unschooling Beyond High School.

Miscellaneous

Vicki at Balderdash and Blokus presents Educational Freedom.

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My deepest thanks to everyone who contributes and everyone who reads this for supporting The Carnival of Unschooled Life. Words are beams of light. Let’s continue to shine them on the things we believe in.

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The carnival will return on December 1, 2010. Submissions will be due by November 30, 2010.

To contribute a post, please use the carnival submission form.

Live, laugh, play, learn, talk, walk, hug, dance, sing, and shine—until we meet again.

Go to life, not school.

The world around me is very wet with rain, which brings to mind my favorite Shel Silverstein poem, the one Stephanie recited years ago in her creative dramatics class:

Lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
Jane.
She
wants
a
drink
of
water
so
she
waits
and
waits
and
waits
and
waits
and
waits
for
it
to
rain.

Image from http://www.readableblog.com.

While I wait for the rain to stop, please allow me to present this month’s carnival.

Life at Home

Rana gives us Dad’s doing his part from Free to learn and lovin it. The post is great, but the pictures are even better.

Out in the World

There’s a place out in the world that I’ve been longing to visit, and I’ll get there one day, soon I hope. It’s the Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street in Lower Manhattan. The museum offers guided tours of apartments painstakingly recreated to look as they did when new immigrants to America lived there at the turn of the last century. The Education page on their web site also offers some nifty ways to start a discussion about this fascinating time when the “poor huddled masses” came to our shores, as they still do.

Inspirations

Laura Grace Weldon presents How to Make Spiders Your Teachers, Trees Your Guides at Relentless Optimist. “Consider the spider,” is Laura’s request.

From the blog 4 + 2 = 6 comes Hard Lessons to Learn, about “how you never know where the dice may have you land.”

Dark Nights of the Soul

Cristina at Home Spun Juggling offers Home Spun Comic Strip #527, in which doubt is countered by positive thinking.

Encounters of the School-y Kind

Last night, our family, and Sylvia and Jim—the wonderful unschooling parents of two tiny wonders who happen to live nearby—had a very dramatic encounter with the school-y world. We attended a screening of the brand new documentary Race to Nowhere. The film’s logo is “The dark side of America’s achievement culture,” and is it ever dark. I’ll be posting a review of the film soon. See it if you can, and encourage your school-y friends and relatives to see it. They may not realize how deeply they are caught up in a system that is potentially damaging to their children’s health.

Beginnings

One of the cherished books of Stephanie’s early life was Amanda Pig on Her Own. The entire “Amanda Pig” series is excellent, but the four chapters of Amanda Pig on Her Own are, in my opinion, truly beautiful and meaningful for any young child to experience.

Passages

We’re riding the earth.
Non-motion is impossible.
—Lesle Lewis

Miscellaneous

Laura Grace Weldon at Relentless Optimist presents If Jane Goodall Were An Alien.

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My deepest thanks to everyone who contributes and everyone who reads this for supporting The Carnival of Unschooled Life. Words are beams of light. Let’s continue to shine them on the things we believe in.

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The carnival will return on November 1, 2010. Submissions will be due by October 31, 2010.

To contribute a post, please use the carnival submission form.

Live, laugh, play, learn, talk, walk, hug, dance, sing, and shine—until we meet again.

Go to life, not school.

Soon, very soon, the leaves will begin to fall and dry out and get crunchy, and the breezes will get stronger and cooler, and the days spent outside will be gloriously brisk and the evenings spent inside deliciously cozy. And the children represented by the blog posts here will not be “back to school” or “back” to anything. They will simply be continuing—carrying out the ongoing cycle of experiencing and learning, living and absorbing, with loving families around them and new things to see, smell, taste, touch, and hear everywhere they go.

One little unschooler in autumn.

Let’s check out this carnival’s examples of the cycles of life.

Life at Home

Once Upon a Family presents Spark’s Imagination. And to think that some people believe kids will only “waste” free time!

Out in the World

Laura Grace Weldon discusses Transferring Enthusiam. It’s a powerful essay about passion for learning.

Inspirations

Laura Grace Weldon graces us once again, with Strong Enough to Be Ourselves. Laura also has a new book, Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything. It’s on my nightstand right now.

Dark Nights of the Soul

Rana at Free to learn an lovin it continues to grow as a thoughtful, dedicated unschooling mom. You’ll find proof of that in Knowing Your “Inner” You.

Encounters of the School-y Kind

I recently got grilled about whether my daughter has an education foundation, by which I believe the well-meaning questioner meant a “What Your Tenth-Grader Should Know” kind of thing. As the queen of non-confrontation, I have a difficult time trying to say that I don’t believe in the linking of knowledge with ages or grades, when I know that the person I’m speaking with holds very tightly to that linkage, as a way of defining what raising a child is all about.

I do believe every person should have a foundation, and I think that foundation includes being able to read, communicate, do arithmetic, act with kindness, exercise forethought, and—above all—think independently. The linkages that the school-y world worships are, I believe, impediments to independent thinking for many children.

That does not mean, however, that, as unschooling parents, all we have to do is avoid those linkages. We have a responsibility to provide experiences and opportunities and encouragement, so that our independent thinkers can expand their minds and build on their foundations in unique and meaningful ways.

Beginnings

Theodora at Travels With a Nine Year Old presents Unschooling. Or Learning as You Go. Keep going, Theodora!

Passages

I have been going through a passage that is beautifully, creatively,  and intelligently described by Sandra Dodd. But then, Sandra is a beautiful, creative, and intelligent thinker, so what else would one expect? As her chart shows, I am spending less and less time with my child, as her life becomes more and more about her choices, wishes, and goals—which require my being at her side less and less. Which is a good thing. Because I trust her completely. And I hope she reads this. And I hope she feels good when she reads this. As do I.

Miscellaneous

Delicious autumn!  My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.  —George Eliot

Enjoy your autumn, everybody!

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My deepest thanks to everyone who contributes and everyone who reads this for supporting The Carnival of Unschooled Life. Words are beams of light. Let’s continue to shine them on the things we believe in.

****

The carnival will return on October 1, 2010. Submissions will be due by September 30, 2010.

To contribute a post, please use the carnival submission form.

Live, laugh, play, learn, talk, walk, hug, dance, sing, and shine—until we meet again.

Thanks to Renae at Life Nurturing Education, there are some fine posts collected in a lovely setting for youre reading pleasure.

Here are my favorites:

• Books in the home: Three words—library book sale.
• Guess the Common Room Family School-Room: I love what the author writes: “Home educating is not, for us, just something we do. It’s who we are. And so it’s spread all over our house and yard.”
• Opportunity Indulges Passion: Cristina is so wise.
• Where Do I Start?—Homeschooling a Kindergardener: Speaking of wise . . . Tiana really gets it!
• Why I Homeschool: It’s for one of the nicest reasons I know.

Read. Learn. Think. Enjoy.

Go to life, not school.

It feels like summer where I live, and summer feels like freedom. When I was a child, summer meant the freedom to be outside, all day long, doing whatever came to mind: playing kick ball, drawing in the dirt with a stick, riding my bike, or sitting on the couch reading a library book while eating grapes that were deliciously cold because my mother kept them in the fridge in a big metal bowl.

Me. Summer. 1967.

That freedom I had then is what I want for children now. That freedom is what I love about unschooling. It’s more than not sitting at a desk every day, whether you want to or not. It’s more than not learning what you’re told to learn. It’s the freedom of knowing that the drawing stick and the bike and the endless bowl of grapes are always there, that the kick ball game can always be started up—even if those things turn into other things, like writing poetry or building a computer.

I want children to have the freedom to create their own environment and live in it the way I lived outside in the summer. Endless summer, for every child. The posts displayed in this carnival reflect that attitude, and I’m proud to present them here.

Life at Home

Angela and her children spent some time in the “home and garden” section, where Angela worked on Weeding Out Expectations, at Camp Wolff.

Also learning in the backyard, Cristina presents Behavior MODification at Home Spun Juggling.

Out in the World

Nikki presents A Nature Walk in Winter at Our Journey in Him.

Pamela discovers Gated Leisure at Blah, Blah, Blog.

Inspirations

Dancing Babies and World Peace comes from Laura at Laura Grace Weldon.

Jeff Sabo presents “Great” Expectations at Just a Bald Man.

Karen at The Stone Age Techie offers Through Children’s Eyes.

Rana declares I am my children’s partner at Free to learn an lovin it.

Dark Nights of the Soul

Ronnie shares a dream in Make a joyful light at Blog of the Zombie Princess.

Encounters of the School-y Kind

Wrapping the point in silk also comes from Blog of the Zombie Princess.

Beginnings

The question How did we begin Unschooling? is answered by Rana at Free to learn an lovin it.

Passages

Let me give you an update on the “learning to drive” experience in our family. Stephanie has been going out with her dad, driving in neighborhoods, on local busy roads, and, just briefly, on the nearby expressways! I think she’ll be ready for her road test in the fall. I’m even getting used to seeing her behind the wheel. The transition from passenger to driver is progressing nicely. And isn’t that what child-raising is about? Getting your child to the point where she can drive her own car? Drive her own life? Get to where she wants to go all by herself? This is just the latest expression of that underlying goal.

Miscellaneous

Mandy presents Education versus Indoctrination at Living Peacefully with Children.

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My deepest thanks to everyone who contributes and everyone who reads this for supporting The Carnival of Unschooled Life. Words are beams of light. Let’s continue to shine them on the things we believe in.

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The carnival will be going on summer vacation. It will return on September 1, 2010. I know that’s a long break, but please don’t forget about us. The Expanding Life will post a carnival reminder as September approaches, and submissions will be due by August 31, 2010.

To contribute a post, please use the carnival submission form.

Live, laugh, play, learn, talk, walk, hug, dance, sing, and shine—until we meet again.