1st Day of Un-Kinder

As previously mentioned we have started a weekly meet for unschooling families with young children around the kindergarten ages, which we're calling "unkinder". Today we had our first gathering at a local swimming pool that has some cool water features for the little ones. To start the day off we had obligatory first day photos ;)

Then we made our way to the pool where we had fun playing in the water with our friends. All our eldest girls would be starting kindergarten this year, which was a rather cool coincidence. Being into the whole natural learning thing, age differences don't mean as much to us as they might others, so it did make me giggle that the girls ended up hanging out with kids the "right" age even at our unschool thing ;) But having said that there was also a 2 year old, 1 year old and 9 month old in attendance.

Next week's unkinder is going to be at Sarah Patricia's house. She's planning home-made play-dough of many colours, chalk drawings on the drive-way, colouring in sheets and maybe even a jumping castle :) We're hopefully going to meet another unschool family with some older kids, including some boys. John Holt Unkinder is going co-ed ;D

John Holt Unkinder

It's been a long time between posts, but we're back! (Not before some stern words from one of our fans LOL, I expect to see her comment!). It's a new year, my big girl turns 4 in two weeks. This would be the year that both Sarah Jane's big girl and mine would be starting kindergarten. 2012 is the year I am making one of my dreams a reality: unschool kinder in our local area.

Where we live there are some great programs, groups and activities for children over the age of 6, but for those of us home educating from the outset, I have not found anything for the not-kindergarteners and not-pre-schoolers. But we know that Sarah Jane, myself and our friend "Alemona" are unschooling and have children 4 years and under, and on the weekend we discovered another friend, new to our circle is also considering unschooling and has a child around the same age. My dream is a weekly gathering that changes venue and hosts from week to week. Whoever is host for that week selects the venue and the activities to strew for the children (who can take or leave the activities). It will be an opportunity for home educating parents to connect with one another and share our journeys, our kids will spend time with other kids living the same lifestyle as their families and at the end of the week those of us who struggle with labels like "productivity", "socialisation", "proof of learning", will be able to say "we achieved something this week" :)

On the weekend Sarah Jane helped me come up with a name for our Unkinder and I made a Facebook group for us to keep one another up to date with upcoming events. We decided to name our Unkinder after a famous author who has inspired unschoolers through his works, introducing: John Holt Unkinder:

"My unkinder vision: a weekly gathering of home learning locals during the day when some friends are at kindergarten. Rotating venues: local hubs of learning: libraries, swimming pools, the beach, parks and our homes. Each week a different family strews the path for the group.

1 week the kids might have a craft project at Saree's house, the next week they might have access to Spanish worksheets at mine. Totally up to you what we do and up to the kids whether they do it or not. Whether the kids chose to do the activities offered to them or strew their own paths with each other, regardless, we parents will get to connect with each other on a weekly basis and share the journey.

Meets will be based in our local suburb and surrounds but visitors from afar are welcome. Children of all ages are welcome, strewing will most likely target the 4 year mark, but being free-range types we don't mind if our kindergarteners are 4, 12, or 30."

Our first day of semester starts on Tuesday February 7 with a Not-the-1st-day-of-kinder swim at a local aquatic centre. If you're a home educating family please feel free to join the group and our first event, and let other home learning families know about us. We'd love to meet more local unschoolers, or those considering home educating to know about us.

Some Hope

Too cool for school

I've been pondering what our lives would be like if I hadn't discovered homeschooling. How different it would be.

I am so glad that I never took anyone's advice about putting Iris in childcare and kinder, or any structured environment. The only reason I realised that she is different and not just "being difficult" is because I spend so much time with her and am connected to her.

Iris would have already been at kinder for a year now, just as we're getting her diagnosis in our homeschool journey. If she had entered the education system she would've been labelled a "difficult child" and "Sarah's child and Sarah never coped with school". 

There would have been so many "justs". "She's just difficult", "she's just bad tempered". With hindsight I probably have Aspergers too. Instead, for my entire school life I was "just rigid", "just over emotional".

Understanding the similarities between Iris and I helps because you can almost call me a functioning adult in the world. Eventually I learned how to be a functioning member of society and have relationships. It gives me hope that Iris will be okay because I'm okay.

Unschool & Aspergers? Unschool Monday

Our unschooling journey isn't going to work the way I thought it would because Iris has Aspergers. In one way it's positive because four years of strange social behaviour, tantrums and obsessions are explained. But I'm wondering what this means for unschooling and our family.

For the past couple of years I've wondered why following the traditional radical unschooling approach wasn't working. Why she wasn't self-moderating, why she wasn't initiating play,  why any activities we participated in and excursions ended in literal tears from both of us. With her diagnosis these things are beginning to make sense. 

But if radical unschooling isn't going to work in our family, what is our homeschooling going to look like? Is it possible to unschool a child with Aspergers?

Rationally I can see why she's with me. I have resources others don't have. But I'm still really sad about it. The Godmother I chose for Iris is perfect, she has resources to help, with her own child on the spectrum. We have people in our lives who can offer support, who have experience with children like Iris.

One of the ideas I have to let go of is that if I put in enough effort, enough activities, enough love and resources it would look like what other unschooling families seem to have. I wondered why our days didn't just flow like other families. In other families it seemed that if they gave their children enough freedom  there would be less conflict and more harmony. But it wasn't like that for us.

I wanted the flow, the natural rhythm of the day. There is no flow in our house. Right now I am sad, mourning what can't be in our family.

I'm joining in Owlet's Unschool Monday.

Our Classrooms: September

As natural learners we understand that the whole world is a classroom. Here are some of our daughters' learning spaces from the past month.

Click to enlarge

1. Garden 2. Sling 3. Kids section of the Museum 4. Farm  

5. Picnic table 6. Library 7. Kitchen table 8. Loungeroom  

9. Vet clinic 10. Trampoline 11. Vegetable patch 12. Museum  

13. Kitchen bench 14. Driveway 15. Plaza bench 16. Discarded box  

17. Friend's couch 18. Park 19. Friend's kitchen bench 20. Daddy!  

21. Great Grandmother 22. A friend's lounge room 23. Swimming pool 24. Family bed 

 25. A tree 26. The dining room 27. Brick fence 28. Bike trailer

Poi Workshops

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated Yule with some friends. Part of our festivities included fire twirling:

What better skill for our freakshow of unschooled children to learn?! Art that burns! Anyway, we asked Loz (our firey friend who organises local twirling get togethers) how to get started and she suggested putting tennis balls in the ends of knee high socks to create home made poi.

First we practiced at home:

It is a lot of fun, whether you're 3 years old or 28. But, you need more room than a lounge room can provide. Next we headed to the beach with Sarah Jane and her girls:

Sarah Jane about 2 seconds before she hit herself in the head

And of course, we practiced outdoors at home:

Using poi for elephant trunks is also a big hit

After practicing at home with our socks and balls, we joined the local fireies and had a go at glowstring poi, the fire staff, twirling glow sticks and we watched in awe at friends with fire poi:

5 of our fire twirling friends at play

Sarah Patrticia with poi

Loz dancing

Harri with glow sticks, Sarah Patricia with glowstring poi

Harri with the fire staff

Sarah Patricia with poi

Harri dancing to her friend's poi-ing

Bubby loved watching the fire

Harri twirling glow sticks, Mumma with poi

Friend with the glowstring poi

Someone also brought their drums along, Harri had a great time thumping out her own beats.

Our friends are hoping to get together one night every month for a fire twirling/poi/drum night, so we've decided a set of our own poi would be a wise investment. And maybe down the track some fire twirling gear too.

Choosing To Unschool My Children

When I first heard my friend Sarah mention she was going to homeschool I thought she was crazy. What would she want to do that for? Her kids would turn into unsocialised freaks! The funny thing was that Sarah had had a successful schooling experience and was not going to send her kids to school, but I had had a traumatic schooling experience but was still going to send my kids! Gradually the more I learned about homeschooling, or unschooling in particular, the more it all started to make sense to me.

I started reading stuff online about homeschooling, but I still thought it was something I couldn't do. I wouldn't be able to cope with my kids at home all day. Then I read a blog post by Currawong describing the start to their day. They eased into the day with no rush to get to school. She wrote about how she'd missed out on those moments for years. That one post made me go "oh!", something just clicked and I started seeing it all a bit differently.

I started thinking what sending my kids to school would mean: six hours a day, five days a week with an adult that I might not trust, who they might not get along with. I thought about rushing out the door every morning and being away from them for that long.

Then I started processing my own schooling journey and realised just how much damage it had done to me. I was worried that if I homeschooled that my children would finish up with gaps in their education. But I realised that I had gone to school and still had massive gaps in my education, so there was that excuse gone. I was also worried about homeschooling on my own.

I never wanted to do schooling at home, I knew that wouldn't suit my children and the way our family works. The idea I had had of home schooling was us sitting around a table with me being their teacher and I knew that I couldn't do that. But the more I learned about unschooling the more it seemed possible and suited to our family.

I love the idea of my kids being able to follow their own interests for as long as they want. If they're interested in numbers then they can follow that for as long as they want, the whole day or the whole week, there's no point at which the maths lesson ends. Or if they want to spend a month learning about monkeys they can. They have freedom and autonomy, two things sorely missing from my education.

I didn't want Iris to think that she couldn't learn something just because it wasn't the right time for her to learn it. I had a discussion with my Dad where he remembered the exact moment at which he stopped bothering with maths. He was learning long division in grade three at school and he couldn't understand and he remembers a wall going down in his brain. Forty years later and he hasn't bothered with a single piece of maths beyond that. After that discussion and thinking "what if he was meant to learn it a week or a month later? He might have discovered that he really enjoyed maths and kept learning it. Maybe he would've ended up being a maths teacher instead of a music teacher?" I knew I wanted them to have the chance to learn things when they're ready.

The older Iris gets, the more I realise unschooling is the right choice for her. She is very sensitive and I just don't think most schools and teachers have the times or resources to deal with a child like her. I've been that sensitive child in that school environment and it is not nice! I struggle enough with Iris, having enough patience on a daily basis, and I'm her mother who loves her. I hate to think of how she would be treated in school because the people there don't have the same feelings for her that I do.

Now that the decision is made I'm really excited about our future! Because we're not restricted by school hours or school terms, we're free to travel or spend the day wandering around a museum or digging holes in the dirt in the backyard. Whatever takes their fancy! The possibilities are endless!

Schooling & Deschooling

I was a very sensitive kid. I would cry at the drop of a hat and I was constantly ridiculed for that, from kindergarten. I remember a teacher told me to sit under a table "like a dog" because I bit another child. It never got any better.

I went to a conservative school and it was hung up on trivial stuff and controlling children's behaviour. So I spent a lot of time in detention for doing things like not eating my bread crusts, crying, wanting to swap sandwiches with my friends etc. I got the cane for calling a sports teacher "a sexist pig" when I was seven (I called him it because he kicked me out of the game). That was 1992.

Then I went to a public school where anything went. There were kids there who were full on, they swore and carried on and all sorts of behaviour I wasn't used to. I had spent so much time getting kicked out of class at my school that I hadn't spent a lot of time in class learning and so I had fallen behind. In grade four I got changed to a different classroom with a different teacher because I didn't get along with that teacher. He physically dragged me out of class one day and I was trying to break free from him and accidentally scratched him. I just wanted him to let me go.

I used to like to read books and do my own thing and this irritated the teachers. I daresay that teacher had been telling me to stop reading and do what he wanted, move to a different space in the room or something, but I kept reading my book.

While I was outside of class after that teacher dragged me out (and I accidentally scratched him) I heard him say to my class of 9 year olds "I hope she doesn't have HIV".

So once I was switched to the other class I pretty much stopped participating. I wasn't coping so I gave up. I brought books to school and I read them quietly, not doing what the rest of class was doing.

When I started high school I ended up at a school that none of my friends went to. I felt like the teachers were picking on me, my science teacher haaated me. She used to threaten me and tell me she would get me kicked out of school. My home room teacher said to me one day "you think you're so fantastic, but you're not" and that was supposed to be the caring one I was meant to be able to go to if I was having problems transitioning into high school.

The other girls in my class started bullying me around that time. They called me "tag along" coz I didn't have any friends. I used to hide in the library and read books, but it was closed to students three days a week so the VCE students could use it without younger kids there.

I had an altercation with my science teacher and the next day I woke up the next day and thought "fuck it, I'm not going". I could see six years of bad schooling behind me and I could see another six or seven years ahead of me and I didn't feel like I could take it anymore. I didn't feel like I had anybody on my side. I said to my Dad "you can't make me go."

Dad got angry and yelled and tried to convince me to go back. Everyone seemed to think it was a phase, that eventually I'd go back to school. No one from school ever chased me up or asked what happened to me. I never went back to high school.

I used to sit at home and read books and watch TV. At one point Dad thought I had dropped out to watch Oprah and the midday show so he took the TV away, thinking it would make me go back to school. It just made me bored. He looked into alternatives for me, schools for kids with behavioural issues, distance education subjects, but it didn't really work. There were no programs or anything to help 12 year old drop outs.

Dad used to threaten me, asking if I wanted to spend my life on a minimum wage. But I was really traumatised by school, enough to not go back.

I taught myself cross stitch and other craftwork. Now when I look back, with the knowledge I have now I can see that I was unschooling myself but it was sabotaged by other people who couldn't see that. I was constantly being told I was a failure because I wasn't at school, because they believed I couldn't learn anything if I wasn't in a classroom.

We had a social worker come to the house and she worked on getting me less fearful and getting me out of the house. She found me a community house that had an education program for adults with learning difficulties.The community house program was meant to be a gentle way to ease back into institutional education. I really enjoyed it because there were only six of us in the room and they were all adults who had chosen to be there. But my teacher told me that she could see that whenever I thought I had got something wrong she could see that I was waiting to be told off. She said she could actually see me "cowering".

When I look back now I think what a pity it was that I wasn't encouraged to follow my own interests while I wasn't in school. All I got from everyone was "if you're not in school you can't learn anything, what are you going to do with the rest of a life, you won't be able to get a job" etc. All of the things I was doing at home to keep myself busy like teaching myself to sew and cross stitch didn't really develop because I was made to feel guilty for doing them because I wasn't doing "traditional" schoolwork.

I'm still interested in the same things I was back then: handcrafts etc. But it's only now (at 25) that I'm getting up the courage to teach myself, after feeling guilty for years and years for "not studying". If I had have been encouraged I'd be an advanced sewer etc. and what a great skill that would be!

To this day the idea of doing "traditional" schoolwork still makes me feel sick to my stomach. It causes me massive anxiety (this is one of the reasons I haven't written blog posts regularly). There are things I've wanted to study but I haven't pursued them because I've been too scared of returning to study, even after thirteen years of being out of the schooling system. I'm still deprograming and deschooling my brain.

Coming to the decision to unschool my girls has helped me realise that there was never anything wrong with me. I'm finally starting to let it go and get the guts to follow my interests and finally looking at studying again.