Teach Your Own Seminar....

Amazing.. today for the first time in many years, I went to the John Holt and Growing without Schooling website. And incredibly, today was the day of their Teach Your Own Seminar!!

Teach Your Own Seminar, August 11, 2012

Pat Farenga has revised his Teach Your Own Seminars to address the needs of twenty-first century learners. 

People are losing faith in conventional education, and rather than sitting down, shutting up, and doing what 

the teacher says, more families are considering homeschooling. 

Unfortunately, doing school at home often reproduces many of the learning problems you thought you left at school! 

Pat Farenga's seminar will engage you to consider how unschooling—learning in ways school doesn't allow

—can work for you and your family. It is a three-hour presentation supported by multimedia, handouts,

 and workshop activities.

You will learn about:

• Unschooling as John Holt meant it.
• The pitfalls of unschooling and homeschooling.
• How learning without a curriculum works in real life.
• How to create your support base.
• Watching and helping your children learn, K—12.
• Knowing what can and can't be taught.
• Getting into college and alternatives to college.
• PLUS answers to all your questions and concerns about living and learning
•  with your children instead of sending them to school.

WOW!!!! Sounds amazing, right!? 

I wonder.. how it can be that TODAY. I feel so let down, but also INSPIRED!! I will share more about my inspiration 
and how we can start learning and creating STRONGER and more empowered Unschooling/Homeschooling/
Self Directed learner families..


In the meantime.. if you went to this event.. ( and there was only room for 15 people to attend.. ) I would love to
hear how it went.. and what you got out of going to it !

To be a Self Directed Homelearner.. or not?

  Just stumbled across The Homeschool Mom website.. and saw the first few line in this post..

Creating a Motivational System.

Everyone knows that homeschoolers manage their children’s behavior with patience, consistency and aplomb, always having the right response at the right time, and leading their children to higher standards of conduct with each and every interaction.

Right.

Now that we’ve dealt with what we are all sure happens in everyone else’s home, let’s get on with the reality of what really does happen in our own homes.

For sure this really resonated with what happens in our family.. there are times when my self directed kids are well.... let's say not so self directed. Ok. let me rephrase that.. they are not so self directed in anything that does not involve the words ' I'm bored" in them.

So, do your kids need a motivational system?

Hard to say, what I do know is that everyone is self-motivated. You just have to find out what the triggers are for each individual child is.

Some kids are really turned on by making money, some by a trip to the park, some by spending one on one time with a parent.. Of course, this also could be one child motivated by all three of these (and more!) at different times.

When we first began our journey in the early '90's and homeschooling was mostly on the radical edge of living, I was really smitten by the thought that kids learn what they need to know, when they need to know it.

The John Holt philosophy of Unschooling, and the entire Growing Without Schooling community felt like the 'right place' for my kids and I to be.

It was a wholistic way to grow your kids. No outer imposed rules of learning, no external bells to tell you when to stop or start a new activity. No grades to impose on young minds letting them feel discouraged by some external forces or encouraged artificially for somebody else's idea of a job well done.

But somewhere along child #1 and #4 and many years later,, I realized that each one of them is so different, and the style of unschooling the way I saw it was not always the best path for them.

Many years have been spent resisting the idea that my ideal world,  where a self directed child would  blossom because they were given such an open ended opportunity to grow at their own pace, under their own direction, may not work for every child!

Imagine my dismay when my kids told me they wanted to have a curriculum and worksheets.

My two youngest daughters have asked recently, just for those things. I  do send them to the internet, to Google, to look up for themselves what would be good for them.. edging them further into the self directed place.  But they resist doing this as much as I have resisted granting their wishes of curriculum and worksheets.


But as I write this out now, I realize that them asking for those things IS being a self directed learner. They are trusting themselves to know what is right for them, and recognizing they want to learn certain things, specifics. And their idea of how to get there is very different than mine of being much less formal about the whole thing.

Maybe I am too entrenched in the ideal. Maybe my thoughts that there are so many tools and opportunities now, more in the past 3 years than the 17 years before.. have created too much for them to narrow down for themselves and they need more of my guidance now than ever.

Hmmm... well.. that is the beauty of writing a blog. Is to discover more about ourselves along the way as we do it.

So today, I am going to pull together some resources for my kids, because they have asked.. and in the future writings on this blog.. I will share those resources with you and tell you what we think of them, and how they are going.

Loving Learning Academy is BORN!!!

Birthing something new is always exciting.. 

We have been a homeschooling family for the past 20 years, and have yet to have a 'name' for our learning environment, mostly because it 'Just is'. Meaning that we did not have to let anyone in our 'secret club' or name it. We were 'just'  a homeschooling family. 

However, when we put our heads together, and came up with a name.. (one of the kids is just amazing at naming things! She comes up with the greatest names!)  It gave an energy, a life force of its own to what we have been doing for a very long time. 

So today, we celebrate our very own Loving Learning Academy. 


Which when you break it down, can been taken two ways.. 

1. We have a loving environment for learning.. 

2. We LOVE learning. All of us. Not just the kids, but the adults too. 

The most magical thing about home learning is that there is so much opportunity to UNLEARN things we have been taught about the way people learn, and the way we 'have' to learn. 

Loving Learning Academy allows for the love to grow in your own unique way. To embrace your passion and run with it. 

SO today.. we celebrate the birth of Loving Learning Academy.!!

Taking a photo of her own creation.