11/01/2007

Unschooling Voices #10

Welcome to Unschooling Voices #10!

I think more than any other edition, this one refects a lot of variation in unschooling. You'll read posts from families that are new to unschooling and some from seasoned veterans as well as families who have unschooling days and those who have unschooling lives.

This edition had 24 participants and 32 submissions. Click on the blog links, stop by and say hello to your fellow unschooling families. Let them know you found them through Unschooling Voices.

Optional question for this month:
1- What advice would you have given to yourself early in your unschooling journey?
2- Ask your kids to take pictures of their favorite ________ (favorite whatever; person, place, thing, etc). Share your photos on the
Unschooling Voices Flickr Group and you can use the Unschooling Voices Flickr Tag.

Our first post is from Pam Genant who blogs at Meanderings Of A Gentle Gull. She shares her thoughts about the word enable, enabling as it relates to her family.

Cher from
Cake For Breakfast shares an except from Rue Kream's book, Parenting A Free Child that inspired her.

Melissa Wiley, (who is one of the sweetest bloggers I've ever come across) explains her post Lovely, Lovely Low Tide, "I use "high tide" and "low tide" as metaphors for our family's shift between more deliberate learning experiences and long, undirected periods of natural learning. This post discusses how the work of radical unschoolers, particularly Sandra Dodd's website and book, influence our unschoolish low-tide times."

Robin from the Life Without School Community Blog, submitted a post by Missy
Chasing Bananas and one by Laureen, Unschooling And The Digital Native.

Karen at
Eclectic Parent shares thoughts on socialization and why "we're to busy experiencing life to worry about our children being socialized."

Doc over at
Doc's Sunrise Rants submitted another great post on socialization titled "What I Learned From Unschooling." (I also enjoyed the readers comments)

Maria from
Living On Adrenaline shares "our family’s story of how we live, educate and love in our home and how being open to life brought me to unschooling."

Silvia, who blogs at
Po Moyemu, submitted, “Live and Learn Unschooling Conference Recap and Radical Unschooling” and has turned it into a short series of posts, the first one mainly about Radical Unschooling and the others about the conference. She's linking them with a liveandlearn tag so people can find the others. She also submitted one of those great Day in the Life of an Unschooler type of posts. (I love reading those!)

Becky from
Life Without School says "How is unschooling like running a marathon? As I reflect on the intensity of running 26.2 miles, I am reminded that a good dose of compassion and respect can get me through my toughest parenting moments."

Laura at
Puddles & Butterflies answers the question of the month in a post titled "Are Your Unschooling Glasses Smudgey"?

Another great post from Pam Genant at
Meanderings of a Gentle Gull is her response to a mom, new to unschooling and a brief description of how her two sons started reading in their own time, two unique boys, different reading experiences.

Answering the question of the month are Cher, who blogs at
Cake For Breakfast and Lesa at Living in Freedom Everyday who both tell us what advice they would have given themselves in the early days of their unschooling. Also from Lesa, a post titled Unschooling Works!

Henry & Janine at Why Homeschool, shared an article on the
value of playing outdoors.

Colleen from
The New Unschooler tell us "as a new unschooler I'm still trying to wade through those murky waters of preconceived notions of what learning looks like and find my place as a facilitator, rather than a teacher, in my son's life. It's a daily struggle, but in this post I write about a happy break through". (good going Colleen!)

Another post from the Life Without School Community Blog, they give background, explainations and resources in a page called
What is Unschooling?

Laura over at Wistful Wanderlust shares her thoughts in "Unschooling-How Did We Get Here?", which is part one of a series that of posts where she shares her journey from mainstream parenting to
radical unschooling.

More posts answering the question of the month were submitted by Mandy from Second To The Right And Straight On Till Morning who blogged about "how my advice to myself early in
unschooling would be to just say "YES!" more frequently and I show how, by saying yes, you encourage your children to be creative and make their own choices about things". Also, check out the great photos her daughter Violet took and submitted. Some more advice from Summer can be found at Mom Is Teaching.

Jason Holm submitted the link to his comic strip called
Schools Are For Fish, which is about homeschooling/unschooling. I posted one of them here a few months back but if you haven't seen all of them, check it out!

Some additional submissions from Silvia at Po Moyemu are "things I had read before homeschooling and they helped a lot, and maybe will be beneficial for other homeschoolers". Take a look at
My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and an essay by John Taylor Gatto.

Here's a post from
Karen Edmisten titled, Label Me Schizophrenic.

JoVE who blogs at Trictomania wrote a post in a discussion amongst a few bloggers about what constitutes a “good learning day”. On rereading her post, she thinks that the conclusions she comes to and the issues she addresses are the kinds of things that a new homeschooler might find helpful.

Rolfe Schmidt submitted a post that "is a little story about how my oldest boy came up with his own arithmetic system, adding colors instead of numbers. I learned a lot about how much kids can learn on their own, how important it is to take them seriously, and the value of learning with your kids. I also started to realize that we were unschooling, and it was working".

Another post from Summer, this time at
Wired For Noise which is about "reading a book on simple living and thinking about how the normal educational system causes us to be dependent on all the gadgets and things we think we need".

Cindy Englan from
The Sound Of Learning blogged about "my youngest turns 21 this year and is now on the road to earning his Ph.D. Listening to him talk about college reminded me that this was the child that refused to read until age 10. The one who detested any and all textbooks, worksheets and tests. He taught me that learning math from Legos and baking cookies was entirely possible, that invented spelling until age 14 meant nothing more than a creative mind was on the job".
From Jenn at
Living Alaska, we have a blog post titled, "Please-Thank You".

Last, is my submission of photos my daughters took of their favorite things. It's the very next post, so scroll down to take a peek at what they love.

I've had so many feelings with this edition...so much has changed for me since the last one. Besides my mom passing away (how I hate typing that-it always stops me for a moment), we've been on an emotional (and legal) roller coaster ride with our oldest son. It was really rough for a while but it looks like at least the legal part of it is over. I'll post more about him at another time. Thank you all for your support during this rough time. It means a lot to me and my family.

The next edition will be out on Saturday, December 1. Spread The Word!! I do my best to promote the carnival and you can help by using the
technorati tag unschooling voices or unschoolingvoices and by placing a link on your blog or website. If you want to place a link to the main page (where all the details and past editions can be found), use the main Unschooling Voices link or you can just link to this edition. This blog is a Do Follow Blog.

Thank you for reading and participating. :-)





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9 comments:

Silvia said...

Thanks for putting this together!

Anonymous said...

I'm going to send a link to the carnival to a friend who needs some encouragement--this was very good timing!
Thanks for your work on this!

Joanne said...

You're welcome (both of you!)...it was my pleasure!

Karen Edmisten said...

Thanks for hosting and for all your work!

Anonymous said...

Quasi-schoolers enjoy this, too!
Thanks for your efforts.

Anonymous said...

Thanks! Nicely done, and very enjoyable.

I especially like -- nay, LOVE -- that you used a single link for each post. (As opposed to linking to the post and also, via the blogger's name, to the home page of the post, which is completely unnecessary. And annoying.)

But why the little hover blurbs informing us as to each link's popularity??? Shades of school! Who cares how popular a given link is? Why pit your contributors against each other like that?

Joanne said...

Thank for the comments everyone.
:-)

our anonymous friend....lol-what an evil mind you have. The
popularity of the links is just a mybloglog feature that helps me track where people came from, where they go and what they click on. It's helpful in determining the focus of this blog. Besides, if I was going to pit contributors against each other, I would probably choose naked mud wrestling anyway. :-)

Anonymous said...

Nice playing field. I personally like the hover link (because mine is the most popular, ha). Lots of blogs I've never seen before (and adding to my google reader). Good job.

Anonymous said...

Great carnival! Thanks for putting it together so well!