When reading comes to an unschooler


This is a guest post by Lehla Eldridge. Her blog is Unschooling the Kids. Lehla’s family lives in Italy.

“I will read when I can read,” were my sons words. At age ten he is on the edge of flying into the world of words. The ‘not being able’ to read phase will soon be a sweet memory. I sit with him as he speaks the words out, I see a big complex word on the page and part of me hopes he will stumble, which is a funny thing to admit, since it is counter to how I was a few years ago around reading. You see the tipping point is coming, he is on the edge of it and it is a delicious honor to witness a child learning to read at their own pace. Like that moment when they learn to walk, or swim—it feels magical to me. Read more

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Corporate training is a great model for homeschooling

For the first couple of weeks in August, we went to Aspen for music lessons. The Aspen Music Festival is huge, and famous, and drives up the price of hotels in Aspen (as if they can be driven up any further.) So we stayed in a town nearby, Snomass. It’s a ski town in the winter but in the summer, it’s a corporate training getaway. Read more

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Anger gets a bad rap – it’s a good tool

This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She homeschools five kids in Washington state.

I have yet to meet a mom who does not wish she didn’t yell.  I have yet to meet a homeschooling mom who has not had blowouts with their children. But people always end their yelling stories with their heads hung in shame. They stop the story before the best part: the part where the anger spurs them on to change: Read more

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How tall will my child be?

Tall people make more money as adults. There is lots of great research about this topic, but the most interesting, to me, is that on average, tall people contribute more to a team than shorter people in a business environment. Probably this is because tall people have more self-confidence because they get treated better because they are tall: geometrically multiplying advantages, or a sentence as an homage to Escher. Read more

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You don’t need to teach kids a second language

My ex-husband’s father is from Peru.  So when we were engaged, we had a big party in Peru. I was shocked to see that my husband never learned Spanish, so he couldn’t talk to anyone. I had already learned French and a little bit of Hebrew and German, so it was not difficult to teach myself a little bit of Spanish before the trip. Read more

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Does self-directed learning lead to bad choices?

Did I ever tell you about my failed reality TV show? I need to talk about it one more time because I still have photos from it. The show had a buyer, so we made a pilot. And then TLC said we are too normal. Read more

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Pokemon GO vs School

We have been traveling all over the place this summer, mostly for cello: Montana, Chicago, Claremont, Chicago, Santa Monica, Aspen. I want to show you pictures of everything. But it would mostly look like kids playing video game in a lot of airports. Or me losing my mind. Read more

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What would my life be like if I didn’t homeschool?

This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She is a homeschooling mom in Washington state. She has five kids, ages 14, 13, 10, 7, and 3.

Sometimes I dream about who I would be if I sent my kids to a traditional school. Would I be more relaxed? Put together? Would we parents have more friends? Would I be thinner? This weekend we went RV camping at the Pacific ocean, next to a playground and a three-family reunion of some sorts. They were nice people. I wondered what I looked like to them. The frazzled woman who should send her kids to school for a break? The great mom that has it all together, or the mom that doesn’t care about her kids? Read more

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Why do I have two blogs? I ask myself every day.

I was struck by this interview on NPR with the authors of Becoming Brilliant:

NPR: What led you to write this book now?

Golinkoff: We live in a crazy time, and parents are very worried about their children’s futures. They’re getting all kinds of messages about children having to score at the top level on some test. The irony is, kids could score at the top and still not succeed at finding great employment or becoming a great person.

Hirsh-Pasek: If Rip Van Winkle came back, there’s only one institution he would recognize: “Oh! That’s a school. Kids are still sitting in rows, still listening to the font of wisdom at the front of the classroom.” We’re training kids to do what computers do, which is spit back facts. And computers are always going to be better than human beings at that. But what they’re not going to be better at is being social, navigating relationships, being citizens in a community. So we need to change the whole definition of what success in school, and out of school, means.

Read more

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I started homeschooling right before it was too late

This is a guest post from Sarah Griffith.

This a story I’ve read many times on Penelope’s blog: How I started homeschooling. But my story feels like the white trash version.  Read more

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