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We Were Already Homeschooling. This Quarantine is Not What Real Homeschooling Looks Like.
We homeschool. However, the word “homeschooling” is a misnomer.We do not spend all of our time at home doing school work. Our choice to skip school was not taken in favor of simply replicating school at home by dividing life and learning into subjects, inflexible time blocks, and bells. We chose to homeschool. It was not forced onto us. More specifically, we chose self-directed education because we wanted to expand the definition of education to include everything a person does and experiences. I wanted my kids to understand learning as something you do every, single day. And I wanted to move learning outside of classrooms, walls, rigid schedules, and state-mandated…
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Finding the Opportunities Underneath this Quarantine Burden
We are experiencing the largest global effort to distance ourselves from one another than anyone alive has ever seen. This call to action goes against the very nature of our humanness, which is to gather socially. I know it will be a huge mental and emotional challenge for many people. My wish for each of us is that we will find, underneath this burden, opportunities. The light in the dark. The purpose inside the pain. The soulful connection despite the physical distancing. While we are social by nature and seek out activities that bring us together, many of us will be spending a lot more time with our own family…
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What’s Your Unschooling Why?
If I had to choose one word to sum up why we are on this unschooling journey, it would definitely be Freedom. Freedom not just for my kids, but for our family as a whole. Our days have not been squandered with busy work or other people’s agendas. We have not locked our family into a system that ignores our individuality by demanding conformity. We have excused ourselves from the chaotic busyness that comes with standardized schooling to step into “pleasurable busyness” that involves activities we love, learning that brings us joy, and living in harmony with our own bodies. We have been free to sleep as long as we…
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Top posts of 2019
2019 has been a big year for the Let ’em go Barefoot community! The number of supporters has continued to rise and the amount of overall engagement on Facebook and Instagram has stopped me in my tracks quite a few times. What has excited me the most is the noticeable shift in perspectives. The things that stir me and inspire me to write are typically not topics for the masses, but this appears to be changing. More people are seeking information about educational choices. More people are seeking articles and research that speak to the critical importance of the early years of a human’s life. More people seem to understand…
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3 Regrets of an Unschooling Mom
We have been homeschooling for 12 years, unschooling for close to 11. My kids have been unschooling since birth, though. I am the one who needed to catch up to what they instinctively knew to be true, which is: Learning happens ALL THE TIME even without adult involvement, control or meddling. Below are three things I sort of/kind of regret. I say sort of/kind of because I believe all our experiences teach us something. Even the failures–especially the failures. So, do I REALLY regret the following? Not necessarily. I mostly mourn the time I lost worrying and comparing. The upside, however, is by sharing my experiences in those early days…
