‘Creating Our Own Path’ Archives
Growing Without Schooling
It’s the best not-back-to-school gift an unschooler could ask for: the newly revised www.holtgws.com site! All the back issues of Growing Without Schooling are now available online for free, as well as many articles, videos, and recordings by and about John Holt. [Read More]
Fire Service Adventures
Ben just finished a full year program, 1 ½ hours a day, of a fire service technology class. It was offered as a part-time elective program through the local school district, and classes were held at a nearby fire station, facilitated by active and retired firefighters. [Read More]
Camping & Tea Parties for Teens
In early June, our family enjoyed a camping trip with a few families from our homeschool group. It’s the fifth year we’ve done some type of camping together, and it’s been fun to enjoy this annual tradition. This year we stayed in cabins at Bay View [Read More]
One Season at a Time
One of the best parts of unschooling is that our lives can flow with the seasons. It’s been spring gardening, high intensity bookkeeping, and math workshop season for me lately. For Ben, it’s been a busy season of guitar-building, learning to cook, [Read More]
Real Writing
As Ben grows older, I keep noticing examples of real writing experiences that are a natural part of our lives. I say “real writing” because they’re ordinary, everyday types of writing, unassigned, and not artificially contrived for someone else’s purposes. [Read More]
Thinking About Mathematics
A while back, someone wrote to me asking about math and workbooks, and recently a couple others have asked some similar questions, so I thought I’d bring the topic here to share some of my thoughts about it. Here’s the initial inquiry and my responses: “My [Read More]
Bloom Times
Last week, while taking a photo of these first crocus blooms, I noticed that only a few of the yellow flowers were emerging, even though I know I had planted some white and purple crocuses too. I wondered why just the yellow ones were blooming, and then realized [Read More]
What do you see?
When you’re walking around in your everyday life, do you see the mathematics all around you? Do you notice shapes, sizes, angles, and patterns? Do you see the potential for counting and sorting and comparing items? Not as lessons, but just as cool things to [Read More]
Choosing Activities
The topic of classes, camps, programs, and workshops for young or new unschoolers came up on a discussion list this week. It got me thinking about the variety of adventures we’ve enjoyed over the years, and how we went about choosing those we participated in. It [Read More]
One Thing Leads to Another
Yesterday, while Ben was reading a book called Born to Run, he read something about molasses, about a runner who liked using molasses instead of other sweeteners. We talked about it briefly, about various sweeteners, how people’s tastes have changed over time, and [Read More]
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