The Homeschooler Winter 2014-2015 by Pam Sorooshian

Winter 2014 - 2015

Learning To Read

In Every Issue: Winter 2014 - 2015 • Vol. 26, No. 4

Featured: 2 / Lessons, Learning Centers and

12 / The News & You: If You Read This, Does It Matter How? by JJ Ross

14 / Brain Waves: The Whens and Hows of Reading by Cathy Earle

Listening

16 / Unschooling in the World:

by Heather Stokhaug

3 / Confessions of a Former Literary Snob

Some Thoughts About Late Reading by Sandra Dodd

by Janet LoSole

18 / Grown Homeschooler

6 / Developing Reading Skills

Reflections From Harry Potter to Living the Dream by Lissy Laricchia

by Marty Layne

19 / What About Math?:

8 / Learning to Read by

Reading Math by Pam Sorooshian

4 / The Journey to Literacy by Paula Sjogerman

Backing Off by Rebecca Taberski

20 / Learning Connections:

10 / John Holt: Real Learning

How Learning Happens by Sylvia Woodman

by Deb Lewis

22 / Teen Time: Top Down vs. Bottom Up by Wes Beach 24 / Getting Tech Savvy: A is for App – Revolutionizing the Way Kids Learn by Michelle Conaway 28 / Dadspeak: The “Island Zen” of Alternative Schooling by Jon Bach 30 / Ask A Homeschool Therapist: Key Words and Questions by Michelle Barone

31 / Creatively Speaking: Enjoy the Flow by Roya Dedeaux

32 / The Handwringers: Learning Curves by Barbara Alward & Diane Kallas

Photo by Heather Booth Printed on Recycled Paper

FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR By Sue Patterson

Learning to Read is the focus of this winter 2014 issue of The Homeschooler. The veteran and experienced homeschoolers are sharing their children’s paths to literacy – and they’re all unique. Some children read early, others read later, many are reading little things here and there and then suddenly full novels! These families have cast off the one-size-fits-all model and are approaching reading in whatever ways work best for their children. This issue will help you as homeschooling parents discover more about the learning process – several of our columnists are diving into more depth on the subject of learning to read. Deb Lewis is joining us to help us understand more about John Holt, an early homeschooling advocate. She will continue with a series of four articles about Holt’s ideas and how they’re all still relevant to homeschooling parents today. We’ve added two new columns with this issue. DadSpeak will allow us to hear more from the fathers in our homeschooling community. John Bach joins us sharing what he’s seeing as his family is just setting off on their homeschooling journey. Sylvia Woodman writes in Learning Connections showing us how a simple penny in the road can lead to all kinds of fabulous learning opportunities. Whether you’re settling into a cozy spot or reading The Homeschooler articles while you’re on the go, we’re thrilled to be part of your homeschooling journey. We hope your winter is filled with all kinds of adventures, opportunities, and growth! Happy Homeschooling and Happy New Year!

Sue

Sue Patterson and her husband Ron currently live outside Austin, Texas. Their three kids have grown and are off on adventures of their own! In Sue’s book, Homeschooling Teens, she interviews 75 homeschooled teens and young adults about their lives as homeschooling teenagers. Find out more about her book at www.HomeschooledTeens.com and about her coaching/mentoring practice at www.SuePatterson.com.

The Homeschooler Production Team:

Managing Editor - Sue Patterson Assistant Editor - Willow Lune HSC Advisor - Pam Sorooshian Copy Editors Roxana Sorooshian Diane Kallas Graphics - Jessica Culwell Printer - Peter Nicoara/Paradise Printing Cover photo by Stephanie Sims

Moving or changing your address? Don’t miss an issue of The Homeschooler. If your address is changing, be sure to email your new information to Editor@HomeschoolerMagazine.com Contacting the Editors For editorial guidelines, letters, articles or questions, contact: Sue Patterson and Willow Lune at Info @HomeschoolerMagazine.com Submission guidelines can be found at our website: www.homeschoolermagazine.com/contribute.html

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Winter 2014 - 2015

FEATURED SECTION Learning To Read

Lessons, Learning Centers and Listening by Heather Stokhaug “What does the ‘C’ say?” “/C/” “What does the ‘A’ say?” “/A/” “What does the ‘T’ say?” “/T/” “Now put them together…” “Chair?”

This was a reading lesson I attempted with my

son when he was six. We were trying yet another reading lesson, using yet another “miracle” curriculum that would somehow allow me to reach my “non-reader” or “reluctant reader” or “late reader”, depending on who you ask.

Within a few days of this lesson, I took my son to a learning center to have him evaluated. Surely he had a learning disorder. I crossed my fingers that they would find something “wrong” with him to explain why all of my wonderful instruction was not working. I read to my son in utero – everything from Dr. Seuss to Gabriele Garcia Marquez. Once he was born, I continued to read to my child, read my own books in front of him, and took lots of opportunities to point out letters, sounds, words, etc. I read while nursing, during naptime, before naptime, after naptime. And I wasn’t the only one – my mom was a first grade teacher who believed all kids should/could read before entering kindergarten. Every quiet (and even loud) moment was filled with reading. And then at the age of two years and 11 months, my son sounded out the word H-O-T all by himself. We quickly jumped on this genius and ordered Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. And so began our terrible mistake. From the beginning, I was onboard with homeschooling, and even unschooling. In many ways, we were doing a great job. My kid loved (okay, obsessed over) trains, so we would go on cross country train trips, visit train museums, stop the car to look at trains, and of course, we read him every train book we found. We were doing so much “right” – it felt great to see his eyes light up when we followed his path. But I just couldn’t let the reading thing go. I was an early reader (applause please!), and I wanted my kids to be early readers, too.

The Homeschooler

So back to the learning center – if they could find something wrong with my son, then I would be off the hook. Here’s what they came back with: your son does not have a learning disability. He has not had proper instruction and is reading below a pre-k level at age 9. For $1500 we can tutor him every day and get him to grade level. After I stopped crying, I called a friend whose 8-year-old was also not reading (as I write this, I am laughing – eight is so young! Why were we so worried?). She suggested I ask about it on the state email list. I wrote immediately, asking for support. Responses started coming in right away, and then I felt really stupid because the truth flooded my email. Listening to my child and following his interests had been amazing – it was fun and he was learning tremendous things, but I had ignored all of that because I needed validation that I was a good mom and a good teacher. The path we took when my son was younger put up a wall between us, and also between my son and reading. He dreads being asked to read something. I still read to him every night for as long as he stays awake, and we listen to a lot of audio books. When he expressed interest in reading, we contacted Scottish Rite Center for free reading 2

continued on page 5

FEATURED SECTION Learning To Read

Confessions of a Former Literary Snob by Janet LoSole

I hadn’t wanted a comic book series to be the vehicle through which my homeschooled girls were compelled to read. Books were all over the house, but there were certain favorites, and they demanded that they be read over and over. Eventually I instituted a rule: if I don’t like reading a book, I’m not going to read it aloud. My thought was that I could avoid the mind-numbing monotony of some books and direct the girls to literature of high quality. This rule worked, for a time. Then the period arrived when our girls seemed to struggle to read on their own, and I was forced to drop all pretense of my former snobby ways. Our older daughter, the more visual learner, found an old, dog-eared, French language Archie comic while we were on holiday in Quebec. The colorful pictures attracted her attention and she was keenly interested to find out what these characters were saying in those bubbles over their heads. She studied that comic for so long that I gave in and bought an English one I found at a second hand store for a dime.

Photo by: Stephanie Sims

Archie Andrews taught my kids to read. And now he’s gonna die! Not because he taught my kids to read, but because in the series Life With Archie, the red headed teenage comic book icon takes a bullet for a friend. But all is not lost, I’d quickly relayed to the girls, the regular teenage Archie is still very much alive and kicking.

Madeleine Holmes, 9, reading the pudding recipe in thecookbook

Around this time, at age 7, she was resisting my attempts to encourage her to read on her own. We had followed a reading program I liked, and she had completed it successfully. However, she didn’t transfer what she had learned in the program to a book of her own choosing. Although she could read up to two large print pages from the resource, she struggled to open a book at I realized that Archie was random and read it. One day she asked me, “Mom, what does bats in the belfry mean?” “Where did you hear that expression?” I asked her. “I read it in the Archie comic,” she replied.

I was stunned. Despite my delivery of resourcebased reading instruction and all those years of quality-only literature in the house, my daughter was learning to read from Archie comics. I lost any sense of pride right then and there and prowled the second hand stores for old copies of Archie and Jughead. The stack resided beside her bed for months and she went through them until she pleaded for continued on page 5

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becoming the vehicle by which our daughters were also learning to read French. No point in looking down our noses at the material. Archie had accomplished in two languages what my resources could not do in one.

FEATURED SECTION Learning To Read

The Journey to Literacy by Paula Sjogerman Photo by Chamille Cyphers

It’s hard to step out of cultural norms. Homeschooling, while more accepted these days, is one of those steps. Unschooling is a giant step past that. And when your kid is a “late” reader and you are okay with it, you’ve really crossed the line. It never occurred to me that my children would not be the same kind of omnivorous readers their father and I are. When my first child started reading at the age of six, I thought that was pushing the boundary of what was right. Then, my second child did not read at six, or eight, or ten. But by then, I had become a better unschooler, and I was completely sure that it would all work out. And it did! Mid-way through his 11th year, he began reading, picking right up at the same level with most excellent readers his age. This could have all gone smoothly and happily – if we had lived in an isolated farmhouse with no television and no friends. But we live in a big city with tons of friends, some of whom went to school, and we love media of all kinds. It’s impossible to escape the message that if you’re not reading, you’re dumb. The sooner you read, the smarter you are.

Chamille Cyphers reading Coraline in anticipation of the movie

So, when people say, That must have been hard,” I have to reply, “Yes, it was.” It was really hard for my kid. Even with a super supportive family and homeschooling group, he was bombarded by messages, both implicit and explicit, that he was deficient. He wanted to read so much, but he just wasn’t ready.

It’s impossible to escape the unfortunate message: If you’re not reading, you’re dumb. The sooner you read, the smarter you are.

The Homeschooler

Now, way on the other side (he just turned 21), both of us would say it was worth it. Learning to read was totally HIS, and he still loves to read. I also believe that he gained some advantages this way. Without his nose buried in a book, he continued to look around at the world and hone his powers of observation. Because he wasn’t reading, he memorized – before rehearsals started! – the parts of Puck and Sir Toby Belch so as to not be embarrassed in our theater group.

Letting his journey to literacy unfold naturally was also good for me. It made me pay very close attention to each tiny step along the way. It challenged me to stay true to my convictions about how humans learn. It helped teach me patience. Most importantly, I did not let the pressure spoil our relationship. We continued to read aloud, talk about the ideas in books, have fun with wordplay, and never let the idea that he was somehow failing enter into our lives. Now I have an adult child who likes books and still likes me. Paula Sjogerman, mom of two always unschooled now adults, is a theater artist and arts administrator living in the great city of Chicago. She likes Shakespeare, singing and short walks on the beach.

Lessons, Learning Centers and Listening continued from page 2

instruction (I didn’t trust myself not to get carried away). We also saw a vision therapist who confirmed that my son’s focusing was about that of a three-year-old. When he wanted to quit those activities, we quit. He still wasn’t reading. But I just stopped worrying. We dropped the curriculum that wasn’t helping and was also making him feel “behind”. We started doing what we set out to do 13 years ago when I attended my first HSC conference -- we just got excited about learning new things and letting our kids do the same. Enter: Minecraft. Since discovering Minecraft last year, my son, now 12, has started reading books on his own, without even telling me. We went to the library the other day and he picked out Diary of a Wimpy Kid 7. I suggested that he might want to read them in order. He said “I’ve already read 1-6, mommy”. And I didn’t do a darn thing to make that happen except get the heck out of his way. *I did learn my lesson – my 8 year old daughter is learning to read on her own schedule. Heather Stokhaug and her husband, Sean, have been homeschooling with their amazing kids, Andrew (12) and Charlotte (9) since the 2001 HSC Conference turned their world around and set them on a journey that would make them better parents and partners in their children’s education (despite a few bumps in the road).

Confessions of a Former Literary Snob continued from page 3

newer ones. The old ones were passed on to her younger sister who learned to read from them as well. From the Archie comics, the transition to “other” reading material occurred. At first, I reluctantly accepted the Archie comic method of reading instruction as a necessary evil to encourage them to read on their own. However, my daughter opened my mind to the quality lurking in the Archie comic. First, as Canadians, we were impressed to find that the Archie comic, as an American publication, once devoted an entire issue to Canadian geography, culture, language, and politics. This same daughter also pointed out to me, “Look, they use 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.” I began to change my mind about the whole deal. The clincher for me occurred on another vacation in Quebec. We’d spent two summers there so the girls could learn some French. Naturally, a stack of Archie comics came on vacation with us, including the original Frenchlanguage issue, now taped together in several places. Their language skills were really coming along after spending a few weeks at a francophone day camp. One night I lay in between the girls on the large bed to read bedtime stories, a habit we continued even while on vacation. I insisted we read at least one French book before defaulting to their favorites in English, and out came the French Archie comic.

“Archie must have a squirrel living in the engine of his car because look,” she said, pointing to the pictures of acorns in the air filter. The visual clues cleared it up for us and we continued with the story. That night in Quebec, I realized that Archie was becoming the vehicle by which our daughters were also learning to read in French. I bet there are parents out there whose children devour comics who agree that reading is reading. No point in looking down our noses at the material. Archie had accomplished in two languages what my resources could not do in one. Janet LoSole and her husband of 20 years, Lloyd Stringer, use the communities of the world to homeschool their two girls, who, when they are not travelling, read books and sing show tunes.

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I went through the stories reading bubble after bubble aloud in French but came upon a phrase with some vocabulary I was struggling with. “Hmmm, I’m not sure what is happening here,” I admitted.

FEATURED SECTION Learning To Read

Developing Reading Skills by Marty Layne Learning to read is like opening a door into a magic land filled with exciting and marvelous things, stories and characters, answers and questions, mysteries and adventures. Once children learn to read, this magic land becomes theirs to explore. Some children learn to read spontaneously before age five.

for a specific event. My children enjoyed the humor in Owl At Home, and, now that there is a second generation in my family, the Max and Ruby series by Rosemary Wells.

Read to your children. It’s the best thing you can do to promote their ability to learn to read. Reading out loud expands vocabulary - yours and your child’s. It gives children concepts to help them understand events in their lives. Books about sibling relationships like Shirley Hughes’ books about Alfie and Annie Rose describe the daily events in a family’s life. Books can help children see how the world works. Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day not only describes jobs that people do, but also how roads are built – something I am aware of every time I go for a walk around the block and see how the street is lower at the edge than in the middle.

Reading Aloud Benefits. Early readers also offer good stories for reading out loud. This can be an advantage when a child starts to read on his or her own, as these readers are familiar, making it easier to decode what’s written. Then longer chapter books of all kinds can be added to your repertoire. Reading out loud to my children was one of my favorite things about homeschooling. We’d be together, sitting on the couch, all piled into a chair, or at bedtime. We became familiar with other people, their stories, their troubles, their joys, their solutions to problems. Their stories became our stories, and the characters became our friends. If you need some guidance for choosing read aloud chapter books, try Jim Trelease’s Read Aloud Handbook and/or ask your librarian for suggestions. Speaking of which, a library card for your child is a wonderful thing. Libraries are such marvelous resources for homeschooling families! And librarians love to help people find books. Just ask!

The Homeschooler

Wordless books Picture books without words like the I Spy books or Where’s Waldo are also great to enjoy One of the great things about homeschooling is that children with a child. Being Some learn by the time they are eight can develop at their own pace able to find and distinguish various objects and others learn to following their own unique in pictures is a helpful read fluently by the developmental timeline. skill to develop. One of time they are 10-12 my grandson’s favorite years old. One of the great things about homeschooling is that chil- books like this is In the Town All Year Round by Rotraut Susanne Berner. In this book, like dren can develop at their own pace following in Anno’s Journey by Mitsumasa Anno, there their own unique developmental timeline to are various people who appear in each picture understand how language is translated into writing. Here are some things that you can do and a story is told with only illustrations. Wordless books offer both you and your child to share the joy of words and language, and an opportunity to be creative and tell a story to support your children as they learn about using the illustrations as a base. reading.

Picture books – not just for young children. Many picture books offer a new perspective on everyday situations. Our Animal Friends At Maple Hill Farm by Alice and Martin Provensen is one that can be enjoyed by a wide range of ages. In How Tom Beat Captain Najork And His Hired Sportsmen, Russel Hoban, the author, demonstrates how messing around is much more effective than training

Many Ways to Listen to Stories. Reciting poems, fingerplays, and singing

Photo by Alicia Gonzalez

finger curled for the handle) Pour a cup (Motion of pouring) And pour a cup (Repeat motion) And have a drink with me. There are many books of fingerplays available at the library as well as online. I found it helpful to have a memorized repertoire to use when we were waiting somewhere and had no resources other than our hands.

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Singing with your children, like reciting poetry, helps them to feel and hear the rhythm in Elisa reading The Little Princess to her brother, Emilio words and can be a fun way to find rhyming words such as in the song Down by the Bay. The songs are also fun ways to build language children’s singer Raffi has books for many of awareness while you play with your chilhis songs, so a child can look at the words dren. A. A. Milne has two books of rhythmic while listening to the song. Great Big Words poetry I especially liked: When We Were Very and I’m Going Down to the Library are two Young and Now We Are Six. Aileen Fisher is examples of the fun way Tom Chapin plays another poet whose work is rhythmic and with language in his songs and music. child friendly. As children grow older, tongue Tumbler Books now offers various levels of twisters are fun, too. children’s books where you can see the words Fingerplays are a simple way to entertain chil- and hear them, too. Many libraries have acdren and help their manual dexterity – simple cess to these online stories. ones like Johnny Whoops for babies and toddlers. (Say Johnny or your child’s name Conversations and discussions matter. as you touch the top of each finger starting It is also very important to engage your from the pinky. Then say “whoops” when you child in conversation – real live interchanges slide from pointer finger down and back up in the present. Talk to your child, listen to to the top of the thumb and back again to the your child, engage in discussions and tell pinky.) each other stories. Write down your child’s stories, helping them make books. This helps Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny them see that books are other people’s stories Whoops, Johnny, Whoops, Johnny, written down so that many people can enjoy Johnny, Johnny, Johnny them. Here are some other fingerplays: Helping your child develop reading skills The Bee Hive consists of continuing to do what you’ve (make a fist, bend thumb and fingers into done – have fun together with books, songs, palm of fist) poems, rhymes, tongue twisters and jokes! Here is the bee hive, Enjoy! Where are the bees? Hiding where nobody sees. Marty Layne is the mother of four adult Here they come creeping, children who learned at home. She’s written Out of their hive three books: Learning At Home: A Mother’s One, two, three, four, five. (count Guide To Homeschooling; Games to Play one finger for each number) with Little Ones; and AutumnStories. She BUZZZZZ! (flutter fingers) also recorded a children’s music CD – Brighten the Day – songs to celebrate the seasons. Her Tea Time blog greatreadalouds.blogspot.ca has reviews a Here’s a cup, (Cup one hand) number of books her family has enjoyed. Please And here’s a cup, (Cup other hand) feel free to contact her through her website And here’s a pot of tea. (Hold hand up for www.martylayne.com. teapot—three middle fingers bent over, thumb stuck out for the spout and the little

FEATURED SECTION Learning To Read

Learning to Read by Backing Off by Rebecca Taberski

Photo by: Laurie Cumbie

Both of my daughters crossed that magical line into reading “fluency” at around the same time – each in the second half of their 2nd grade year. I know there were YEARS of build up, but still, it seemed to happen overnight. Like magic. Their individual journeys to get there were vastly different, but after partnering, guiding, facilitating, and then just plain old staying out of the way, I felt pretty confident that my youngest, a boy, would find his own way, too, in his own time. And yet... He didn’t seem to be as interested in the whole reading thing. Being read to, yes! But not reading for himself. Being six and not interested didn’t bother me. Not a bit. Being seven and not interested didn’t bother me. Not really. Being eight and not interested didn’t...wait, that started to bother me.

Reading signs at the Zoo

So I tried a little bit of extra “nudging”. Nudging that was not well received by my son. I’m a big fan of a well-placed, gentle nudge, but it should be noted that continuing to offer unwelcome nudging is nudging no longer. It becomes pushing. I knew better, and yet And then I listened to my young son here I was – pushing. So I backed off.

The Homeschooler

as he matter-of-factly told me how he reads everywhere we go. How when nobody is watching him or asking him questions, he reads signs: Street signs, signs in restaurants, at the library, businesses we drive by and stop in...signs EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME.

Well, let’s be honest here. I backed off after I went ahead and made a mess of things. But I backed off. I took a deep breath and continued on – continued to read to him, answer his questions about what things said in his video games and on television, birthday cards, signs, and books he would look through. When I read aloud to him before bed I would still offer to read with him if he wanted. And then were times when I didn’t offer, that he asked. A book that seemed to click for him, that prompted him to ask more nights than not to read to me, was The Children’s Story Bible. It was at this point in the whole process that this eight-year-old of mine informed me that he reads all the time during the day. All the time. Really? The schoolish part of me (a very teeny tiny part, but still there to rear her disdainful head from time to time) clucked her tongue and said, “I don’t see any of that going on, and if I don’t see it and hear it and measure it, then it didn’t happen. And besides,

Photo by: Laurie Cumbie

A little family reading time with the Cumbies

whatever it is he’s doing is NOT the same thing as sitting down with ME and practicing reading.” I promptly slapped the schoolish part of me. Hard. She didn’t even see it coming. And then I listened to my young son as he matter-of-factly told me how he reads everywhere we go. How when nobody is watching him or asking him questions, he reads signs. Street signs, signs in restaurants, at the library, businesses we drive by and stop in...signs EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME. I smiled and told him how awesome that was, and that one day soon he’d be able to read anything and everything without even having to try. He just would, like his older sisters. He was still a tad doubtful. After that conversation, I began to pay a bit more attention. I discreetly watched him at moments throughout the day. Watched how observant he was, noticed the times where he stood looking at a sign or a cereal box, sometimes mouthing the words to himself. The unschooler in me went ahead and called forth that schoolish part (the part I’d slapped with relish into a dark, isolated corner). “See? Do you see that? That’s how it happens. Shame on you for making me doubt, for making me not see the full value and beauty in that.” My son is nine now and will be a 4th grader. He enjoys reading shorter books with lots of pictures or illustrations thrown in here and there. As his skills grow, so does his confidence in himself. The lure of food coupons and cheap toys through our local library’s summer reading program has prompted yet another burst in his reading fluency. So now at night before I read to him, he’ll lie there reading a Mr. Putter and Tabby book.

The schoolish part of me would have made him sound it out or figure it out for himself. But now I simply answer my son’s questions. Rebecca Taberski is a second generation unschooling mom to 3 goofy, nature loving, sports obsessed kids. Their time is spent living life together and passionately pursuing interests and goals. At Down a Rabbit Trail, I share about homeschooling & unschooling, interest-led learning, incorporating aspects of the Charlotte Mason method into our learning lifestyle and an abundance of nature study.

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I just sit there with him, keeping him company, waiting for my turn to read to him. Sometimes he reads out loud to me. Other times he reads silently to himself, occasionally turning the book around and pointing to a word he can’t figure out.

JOHN HOLT SERIES Deb Lewis

John Holt & Real Learning “Real learning is a process of discovery, and if we want it to happen, we must create the kinds of conditions in which discoveries are made. We know what these are. They include time, leisure, freedom, and lack of pressure.” ~ John Holt

John Holt was a school teacher and author who became an advocate for school reform in the 1960s, and when he no longer felt schools could be reformed, an advocate for homeschooling. He wrote 10 books on education and established Growing Without Schooling magazine in 1977, which was published until 2001. His clear and analytical ideas inspired a few bold parents to reject schools in favor of a life full of learning for their children. Though he had no children of his own, he worked and spent time with children and found them inspiring and interesting. He believed children had a passionate need to understand the world around them, which he called a biological drive to acquire inforHolt pointed out the benefits to learning mation and knowledge and to make if children have choices, peace, safety, sense of the world. He had strong when their self-esteem is intact and they ideas, supported by research and have projects and interests of their own observation, about what helped and to pursue with the help of a loving adult. what harmed learning.

“Relationship,”

In all of his work, Holt meticulously Holt said, “was crucial to learning.” demonstrated how school pressure, coercion, and assessment got in the way of learning. Children failed in school, he said, because stress and fear, fear of being wrong or of disappointing adults, stunted learning, No one can really learn well when being forced to learn things that aren’t personally important. The system and the teachers worked against what children really needed in order to learn, and harmed children in the process. He felt that teachers often disliked children and contributed to their insecurity and fear.

As Holt came to believe keeping children out of school was a good option, he encouraged parents not to make the same mistakes schools made. Holt knew the same damage from school could happen at home if parents were more interested in being teacher-like and playing school than they were in understanding and facilitating learning. In Learning All the Time, Holt wrote,

Photo by: Stephanie Sims

The Homeschooler

Holt also pointed out the benefits to learning if children have choices, peace, safety, when their self-esteem is intact and they have projects and interests of their own to pursue with the help of a loving adult. Relationship, Holt said, was crucial to learning.

Madeleine, immersed in How to Train Your Dragon

“Learning, is not the product of teaching. Teaching does not make learning. As I mentioned before, organized education operates on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them. This is not true. It is very close to one hundred percent false.”

Photo by: Quita Gray

And he urged homeschooling parents not to replicate school at home and cautioned against the teacherly approach: “Not only is it the case that uninvited teaching does not make learning, but – and this was even harder for me to learn – for the most part such teaching prevents learning. Now that’s the real shocker. Ninety-nine percent of the time, teaching that has not been asked for will not result in learning, but will impede learning.” Holt’s writing is moving and provocative, but his work wasn’t just an appeal to emotion. He cared about good judgment and reason. He cared about clear thinking. He tried to help teachers and parents really understand learning, what would harm it, and what could make it grow and blossom. Reading outside with her baby doll Holt knew that learning requires trust. Anything that hurts a relationship between a parent and child hurts learning, too. Judgment, criticism, and correction can inhibit a child and stifle learning. Again, in Learning All the Time, Holt describes learning to read as it must feel to a child, as a “dangerous adventure.” The potential for a child to fail, make mistakes, to become embarrassed or feel bad about himself means there must be sufficient comfort, security, and support in order for him to be successful. No one wants to start out on a potentially dangerous adventure with an impatient grump or critic.

Though Holt started writing 50 years ago, his work is still relevant today. It has been the foundation of many happy and peaceful homeschools and the evolution of the modern unschooling philosophy. Parents who read and consider John Holt’s work may be able to side-step the problems of schooling and teaching and avoid school at home. And they may be better able to see their children as Holt saw children, eager explorers and thinkers, philosophers building a model of the universe. “Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. They learn much more from things, natural or made, that are real and significant in the world in their own right and not just made in order to help children learn; in other words, they are more interested in the objects and tools that we use in our regular lives than in almost any special learning materials made for them. We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions – if they have any – and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.”

Deb Lewis is the mom of grown up, always unschooled Dylan, and wife to David. She lives, works, plays and learns in Montana.

Winter 2014 - 2015

I have quoted here from Learning All the Time, Holt’s last book, published after his death. It was pieced together by his publisher from notes, letters, and articles Holt wrote and is a short 162 pages. It’s an easy introduction to the ideas of Holt for anyone looking for a place to start.

If You Read This, Does It Matter How?

Photo by Meredith Ross

The News & You JJ Ross

Pew Research surveys consistently show a declining number of American adults who have read a book in the past year; there is scientific research showing that we have different neurological responses to reading on a screen versus reading on paper. The fact that reading has recently become such a popular subject for scientific research — a study in Science last year showing that reading literary fiction makes people more insightful and empathetic, a study in Neurology last year showing that reading helped elderly people avoid memory loss — tells me how anxious we are about its benefits and how much we fear its endangerment, as if by losing it we might lose ourselves. (San Francisco Chronicle, “Learning how to read again, this time slowly” by Caille Millner, Sept 19, 2014) If you are reading this, you must have learned to read. But do you know how are you reading it, exactly? What method do you use, if you have any idea, and do you remember how you first learned to use that technique, and whether someone actively “taught” it to you? How much do you really remember about how you learned to read, and how much do you think any of that matters now, to how you are reading this? Now hold that thought. “Noah Webster believed in phonics, Horace Mann in the word method. In the late 1920s, as progressive education became an influential movement, schools began to switch from phonics to whole-word reading instruction. The much-lampooned mid-twentieth-century Dick and Jane readers, and also Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat are based on whole-word theory.... Rudolf Flesch’s scorching 1955 best seller Why Johnny Can’t Read turned the pendulum back toward phonics in the 1960s. By the 1980s, the glory decade for whole-language, the pendulum had swung again. (“The Reading Wars” by Nicholas Lemann, The Atlantic magazine, Nov 1997.)

The Homeschooler

Do you remember learning to read by phonics or the word method or whole language, or any particular way at all? If not, do you think your children will remember learning to read, long after they have learned? I did a (completely unscientific) study in my own household this week and asked each of my homeschooled children, my schooled husband and my schooled visiting best friend, if they remembered how they learned to read. None of them could recall being taught to read using any particular method, how they learned to read or indeed, learning to read at all. Neither can I. It tempts me to think that how someone learns and how someone reads isn’t as important as THAT you learn and THAT you read.

Ever read To Kill a Mockingbird by southern recluse Harper Lee? It was my firstborn’s first favorite chapter book that she read by herself when she was not much older than protagonist Scout in the story. My daughter had learned to read with no instruction, early and at home, which explains why the scene in which young Scout almost accidentally learns to read well at home by watching her father with his daily newspaper - thereby annoying her first grade teacher who insisted that children must be taught to read at school by the professionals using the proper methods and not at home, gasp! - made her laugh, and made her love the book as her own special story. “Now you tell your father not to teach you anymore. It’s best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage-”

“Ma’am?” “Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.” I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church- was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces.... Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Scout and Atticus with the daily newspaper To Kill A Mockingbird

Spark Notes calls this “sharp social commentary on the theme of children and education” and in its analysis of Lee’s classic, describes Scout as “victimized by her teacher’s inexperience”: Miss Caroline cannot accept that Scout already knows how to read and write, because it confounds the teaching formula that she has been taught to implement... To Scout, this method is dull; to the reader, it exemplifies how well-meaning but rigid thinking can fail. But had young Scout lived in our real world, would it someday come to matter to her as a college student or a stressed teacher or office manager, perhaps, if she found herself not sufficiently disciplined in her reading and needing to learn a reading method that would help her read faster and retain more of what she read? Grown-up and time-pressured Scout could learn to read again, perhaps by speed-reading? But what if maximizing productivity and efficiency isn’t all our hypothetical grown-up Scout wants from reading? Suppose it turns out she doesn’t have the need for speed and hopes instead to slow down her way of reading? Author Carl Honoré writes in his book In Praise of Slowness about learning to do everything, including reading, more slowly rather than ever-faster: “Does it really make sense to speed-read Proust? ... Even in the era of the one-minute bedtime story, there is an alternative to doing everything faster.” Since In Praise of Slowness was published about a decade ago, Honoré has published books including one in 2009 focused on what we might call “slow parenting” and most recently, The Slow Fix, about which reviewer Andrea Gordon in the Toronto Star wrote:

Now back to my original question. If you are reading this, does it matter how? JJ Ross, Ed.D., connects everything to everything else. She spent half of her six decades in public schooling, the other at home with kids, and the main thing she has learned in all that time is that the ones who need to be learning new stuff every day aren’t so much the kids in school – it’s the rest of us.

Winter 2014 - 2015

“The ethos of the quick and shallow fix is everywhere, he says, seducing governments, shortsellers on Wall Street, businesses, school boards...Our turbocharged society demands it. Our primitive brain is wired to deliver it. “But the answer to modern society’s complex challenges, he argues, requires a whole new way of thinking — a holistic, creative and broad-based approach that gets beneath the symptom, addresses the roots and changes the culture that led to it. “People are feeling their children are racing through their childhood rather than living it, and they’re not really learning.”

Photo by Cathy Earle

BRAIN WAVES Cathy Earle

The Whens and Hows of Reading

The Homeschooler

When delving into research on how kids learn to read, of course I wanted to discover what research has actually found, rather than choosing research findings that confirm my fondest notions while ignoring anything I don’t want to believe. However, that proved to be tricky.

Gray points out that, without the pressure of text-heavy school instruction from an early age, children are free to learn to read when they themselves are actually ready, and when they see a need for it. The age at which this happens varies widely from child to child, ranging from ages 3 to 13; yet assessment of these kids at age 15 shows almost no difference between kids who learned to read “early” and those who learned “late.”

For one thing, study after study has found that kids who are “behind” in reading in Kindergarten and Grade 1 fall farther and farther behind their I DON’T want to fellow students as Psychologist and author Peter Gray believe the “three they get older. The points out that it is only important that pivotal longitudiauthors of these kids learn to read “on schedule” if those nal studies” that studies urge early kids attend traditional school. the American identification of Federation of reading problems Teachers used to show that waiting for kids’ and learning disabilities as well as early intervention to solve problems, accommodate readiness “rarely works: late bloomers usually just wilt.” I DO want to believe Peter Gray’s disabilities, and catch them up. much smaller study of unschooled students. However, psychologist and author Peter And even while admitting this bias, I would Gray points out that it is only important that argue that Gray is right: it is the structure of kids learn to read “on schedule” if those kids school itself that makes problems for kids attend traditional school. As we know, most who are out of synch with the curriculum, assignments in and assessments for every and it is the traditional educational practices subject – not just “Reading” – depend on that create reading problems and learning reading. “disabilities” where, in many cases, there is just variance in readiness. Peter Gray goes on to explain, in his article Children Teach Themselves to Read, that kids The take-away: who do not attend traditional schools – kids ➢ Make sure there are many and varied who attend Sudbury-style schools, unschool, sources of print in our kids’ environments. or homeschool with flexible and individual➢ Read aloud to your kids. ized curriculum – can learn to read much ➢ Look for signs of readiness and respond to later without any ill effects. These non-tradiinterest in independent reading. tional students often learn science and math ➢ Support kids’ efforts once they embark on and history through DOING things – doing learning to read. science experiments, exploring nature, playing games, programming robots, participatWhat else does research tell us about ing in living history events, touring everyreading instruction? thing from old forts to modern courthouses, and much more. Many un-/homeschooling According to Cambridge researcher David families enjoy read-aloud sessions even when Whitebread, all children benefit from more kids are older. Assessments are often miniplay and exploration time before their formal mized or delayed, and bubble-in tests are ofeducation begins. He suggests not starting ten replaced by portfolios or oral assessments.

formal education and literacy lessons until age 7. The take-away: ➢ Let kids play and explore while they are young. ➢ Don’t begin curricula and textbooks until age 7 or older. ➢ If children spontaneously read before age 7, allow them to read as much as they like, but don’t launch into formal lessons. According to multiple articles and research studies, there is no one reading instruction program or technique that “works” for every child. Some children respond better to phonics instruction, and others to “whole word” instruction; most kids do well with a mixed approach. Gray points out that many children teach themselves to read without any instruction at all, and that they often go very quickly from (seemingly) non-readers to fluent readers. This rapid transition can seem mysterious, but a lot of learning has been going on “behind the scenes.” It’s worth noting that some kids don’t “magically” learn to read on their own and do need help and support. The take-away: ➢ Don’t splurge hundreds of dollars on a particular program that promises results with every child. ➢ Don’t hold so firmly onto any preconceived notion that you cannot respond to the particular needs of your child. ➢ Once your child demonstrates readiness for and excitement about reading, be ready to use a variety of materials and methods to help them learn.

The take-away: ➢ If your child seems to lose track of the sense of a story, check out Gathercole and Alloway’s Understanding Working Memory. Character-driven fiction helps people learn social skills and empathy, whereas plot-driven fiction and nonfiction don’t have similar results.

➢ Be sure to include some literature with rich, complex characters as you read aloud to your children. ➢ Encourage informal discussions on what the characters are thinking and feeling, their motivations and goals. ➢ Include literary fiction and nonfiction on your shelves and library orders. Attempts to push reading with kids who are not ready can backfire. The school system has been providing generations of proof that pushing can have disastrous results, but Gray’s study confirms that similar negative results can occur with parental pushing. The take-away: ➢ Look for signs of readiness: knowing the alphabet, enjoyment of looking at books and magazines, pretending to read, and the ability to repeat sentences of seven or eight words. ➢ Once you detect readiness, offer to help your child learn to read independently, but be ready to back off and try again later if your child seems unwilling or confused. Penelope Trunk points out that today’s kids don’t need to memorize as much as students in the past did, but they do need to become great at searching for information and handling high volumes of information. She suggests teaching older kids to scan material so that they know what is available and where to find info if and when they need it. (I would add that kids also need critical reading skills, including analyzing and checking multiple sources.) The take-away: ➢ Think about the very different reading skills that are required by our hyperconnected world.

Cathy Earle is an education writer who homeschooled her three daughters up to college. You can read what one of her daughters now writes about those experiences at The No-School Kids: A Homeschool Retrospective (www.homeschoolretrospective.com), and you can find her free resource for kids at Every Day Is Special (www.every-day-is-special.blogspot.com).

Winter 2014 - 2015

According to Susan Gathercole and Tracy Alloway, about 70% of kids who experience difficulty learning to read have working memory problems. With a smaller mental workspace in which they can hold information while processing it, they have difficulty remembering the gist of what they are reading while they are sounding out the next word.

The take-away:

Photo by Sandra Dodd

UNSCHOOLING IN THE WORLD Sandra Dodd

Some Thoughts About Late Reading

Adam & Tess finding a quiet spot

Photo by Sara McGrath

Photo by Sarah Wassinger

Photo by Alicia Gonzalez

Elisa Marie, a Harry Potter fan

Maia & Kalea reading side by side

I want to start with a disclaimer. The photos are all wrong. I requested photos from unschoolers of “children reading or seeming to read.” The photos were varied and wonderful. But to discuss how children learn to read naturally, a photo of a child with a book is missing the point. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many families owned few to no books, but schools had books, and so children who wanted to read went to school. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, print is everywhere. There is more print available in your home, probably, than was in my elementary or Jr. High school library and textbook storage room. And with the internet, you have more than the library at my university had. But that, too, misses the point.

The Homeschooler

There are many things children can read besides books:

advertising flyers billboards birthday cards post cards captions comics directions for kits doors charts, graphs plant guides bird guides cereal boxes DVD cases email food packages game instructions gravestones grocery lists

historical markers instant messages instructions leaflets letters from Grandma license plates magnetic poetry words maps subway posters graffiti manga marquees catalogs menus games Minecraft chat phone messages political yard signs

Pokemon cards price stickers Amazon listings programs recipes score cards Skyrim dialogue skywriting street signs trivia games guide signs warning signs wikis window signs zoo signs one’s own diary home-made books

I hope as you went through that list, you noticed some things that could be added. Words are all around us. According to the recent book Bad for You: The War Against Fun, Plato feared and objected to people learning to write, because it would keep them from developing the good memory necessary for Greek oratory. I didn’t know that, when I discovered how much my daughter Holly could learn and do without reading.

Photo by Cara Barlow

I expected Holly to learn to read earlier than her brothers had. I thought her “late reading” would hold her back, but in ways I had not foreseen, it launched her forward. When she was nine or ten and spoke at a Girl Scout ceremony, other girls were holding their written reports and mumbling into the microphone as they mispronounced words they had copied from a book but never heard or read aloud. Holly stood, poised, and SPOKE – didn’t read, because she couldn’t. She was the only one who “spoke” that night. The other girls failed, in public, to read fluently. When Holly was in a play and Anna Barlow reading Bad for You: The War Against Fun couldn’t depend on the script, she spoke the lines we had helped her learn at home, and in waiting for her cues, she learned all the parts. During the play, she was the prompt for the other child actors who were lost onstage without the script they had depended on.

When she did learn to read, she was 11. A homeschooled (not unschooled) neighbor who was ten wasn’t reading, and her mother pressured her by saying “You don’t want to be like Holly.” The mother assigned the girl to read a Judy Blume book. Sometimes she couldn’t play because she hadn’t finished her reading. Holly asked me to buy her a copy of the same book; I did. Holly would follow along as the other girl stumbled aloud through the book, chapter by chapter, and Holly learned to read during that process. After waiting for the other girl to be able to move on to other chapters, Holly got impatient and read the rest on her own. I don’t think the neighbor ever did finish that book.

Before a child can read, He Cannot Read. Lessons and pressure won’t help. It’s not making sense yet. One day the marks become words, IF he has not been pressured and shamed, rushed and blamed.

After one other Judy Blume book, Holly said, “Wasn’t Stand By Me based on a Stephen King novel?”

With difficulty, because he kept interrupting, I tried to tell that story to an education professor in Australia.

Winter 2014 - 2015

We went and bought Different Seasons, a collection of King novellas, containing The Body, on which her favorite movie was based, and she read that. She understood it, reading aloud to me sometimes when something excited her. She told me why she thought some elements had been changed or left out, for filmmaking reasons.

I should back up. When I was in Australia in March 2014, there was a TV program about unschooling. It showed an American family that wasn’t a very good example and didn’t come across attractively. As I watched with my Australian host family, we all cringed. Then they

Ever since then, Holly has liked to see a movie and then read the book, happy to figure out what can’t do, that authors can, or the other way around. Unlike readers who attach themselves to a book, determined to hate any variations, Holly sees great value in both.

continued on page 26

GROWN HOMESCHOOLER REFLECTIONS Lissy Laricchia

From Harry Potter to Living the Dream Lissy (Elle) Laricchia is a 20-year-old photographer from Ontario, Canada, living in New York City. Her photos predominantly center around feelings of nostalgia and feeding her inner child. She was recently selected as one of Flickr’s 20under20, a celebration honoring some of the best young photographers on Flickr. Photo by Lissy Larricchia

Lissy Laricchia jumped at the chance to leave school during spring break of second grade. Growing up in the Toronto area with her two brothers, once they left school listening to mom read the published Harry Potter books (books one to four at that point) soon became a favourite activity. For the first year or so at home Lissy professed to hate reading. But without the pressure to learn to read, and the pull of a great story, Lissy’s road to reading began in earnest.

The Homeschooler

She started listening to the Harry Potter books on CD in her room A little reading in the forest while sewing costumes for her stuffed animals and creating wire jewelry. A new book release in the series was a cause for family celebration. She marked all her favorite places in the books and wrote out many of the signs, letters, and songs found in the storyline. Sometimes she wrote them by hand, sometimes she typed them. Sometimes she followed along in the books. Then one day she decided to try reading on her own and it wasn’t long until she announced herself able to read! She could often be found curling up with a book in any cozy spot she could find, and she’s still an avid reader. Her love for Harry Potter eventually branched into a love of music, interestingly by way of fan fiction, in a great example of those wonderful yet unpredictable connections. When she was thirteen she began going to shows, seeing many alternative bands at small clubs around the US and Canada over the years. She was also in the Girl Guides program from the age of eight, volunteering with the younger girls, and culminating in being awarded the Canada Cord at seventeen. From the age of sixteen she volunteered weekly at the local SPCA thrift store. There weren’t any local support groups back then, so Lissy and her family met up with other homeschoolers/unschoolers at conferences in the United States, and her mom hosted the Toronto Unschooling Conference for several years. Lissy became interested in photography around the age of 14. She took photos and explored pictures in magazines, books, and online. She started her first self-portrait 365 project on Flickr when she was 15, spending hours each day working until she had a photo she was happy with. It was an incredible learning experience, and she received lots of encouraging feedback. At 16 she was approached by a photographer’s agent in Toronto and signed with her for commercial work. When asked on her blog if she planned on being a photographer for living, and, if she hadn’t discovered photography what would she have done, she replied: 18

continued on page 21

PC: JD Weddingphotography

WHAT ABOUT MATH? Pam Sorooshian

Reading Math

It is the end of a long day of fun and learning. Dinnertime has come and gone. Baths have been taken. This is one of the sweetest times of your homeschooling day. You pick some of your favorite read-aloud books and call the kids to come and cuddle up. Time to do some math. Wait, what? Math? Now? At bedtime? Did you just cringe? The phrases “cuddle up” and “do some math” are seldom said together, but why not? There are many wonderful math-filled children’s books that are delightfully entertaining and make fabulous bedtime stories. Enjoying literature together is a wonderful way to introduce children to all kinds of mathematical concepts from counting to Cartesian coordinates. Starting with beautifully illustrated and interesting counting books, you can move on to some really fun books that involve adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, remainders, fractions, very large numbers, geometry, money, measurement, probability, graphing, and more. And not only can children pick up actual mathematical knowledge through exposure to it in a natural way and in a context that makes sense, but literature can also set the stage for children to engage with math in the future with the kind of positive and confident attitude which is key to successful learning while avoiding math anxiety or phobia. Young children love to count, and many people enjoy counting books with their toddlers. There are too many great counting books to list them all. Many introduce sorting, grouping, categorizing, and matching. Some of my favorites are: 1, 2, 3 to the Zoo by Eric Carle; Seven Blind Mice by Ed Young; Ten in the Bed by Anne Geddes; 12 Ways to Get to 11 by Eve Merriam; Fish Eyes: A Book You Can Count On by Lois Ehlert; and Ten Hungry Rabbits by Anita Lobel. If you browse your local library or bookstore shelves or search for “counting books” on Amazon, you’ll discover many fabulous counting books about almost any topic you can imagine from construction machinery to dinosaurs to hugs from daddy.

Another great division book is A Remainder of One which is also by Elinor Pinczes. A couple of great fraction books are Eating Fractions by Bruce McMillan and Lion’s Share – A Tale of Halving Cake and Eating It, Too by Matthew McElliogott. Money and economics are the topics of the hilarious Pigs Will Be Pigs by Amy Axelrod and Alexander, Who Used to be Rich Last Sunday by the wonderful writer Judith Viorst. And last but not least there is a wonderful little book that tells how Rene Descartes invented the Cartesian continued on page 23

Winter 2014 - 2015

You can also introduce and explore many arithmetic concepts through children’s literature. For example, one of the best simple addition books for young children is One More Bunny: Adding from One to Ten by Rick Walton. Ten Sly Piranhas by William Wise and Victoria Chess will have you giggling while doing subtraction. The King’s Commissioners by Aileen Friedman is great fun and all about grouping and multiplication while One Hundred Angry Ants by Elinor Pinczes offers a clear visual look at division.

LEARNING CONNECTIONS

How Learning Happens by Sylvia Woodman Photo by Stephanie Sims

One of the most frequent questions I hear is, “What does a typical day look like in your house?” It’s hard to know how to answer since what we are doing is what we have always done. We live our life, have fun, try new things, talk about them. Mostly, the learning happens almost “under the radar” – people talking, laughing, doing stuff, watching things, tasting things, and making connections that make sense to them. Occasionally, like spotting an insect in the grass, I “catch it” while it’s happening and I try to document it on Facebook. It pays to keep your eyes open.

Trevelyn and Madeleine Holmes

pondering pennies Recently, we were at our local Farmer’s Market where they have, among all the stands for different farms, an Amish butcher shop. While we were there, Gabriella, 10, and Harry, 8, both found pennies on the ground. On the car ride home the kids took a very close look at their finds. Gabriella asked if Abraham Lincoln was always on the penny, and I was able to share that I have some pennies from the 1860s with an American Indian on the coins.

Then we talked about the phrase “In God We Trust,” and how with money there has to be a kind of “leap of faith” about its worth as it is made of only bits of metal and pieces of paper. This led to a discussion of the gold standard, and why some people think we should return to that. The kids wondered what would happen if we “changed the rules of money in the middle of the game?” Would there be enough gold to go around? We then talked about how some countries use US dollars as their currency since US currency is considered more stable than their own money. We also talked about where money is made, and I wondered aloud if it’s still possible to tour a mint. I remember taking a tour of the Philadelphia Mint in the early 1980s. Then Harry noticed that the two pennies were exactly 40 years apart...All of this for two cents. We got way more than two cents worth out of that discussion! Now THAT’s value!!! After I got home, I wrote up what happened and posted it on FB, receiving a lot of “likes” and comments. One from a non-homeschooling friend jumped out at me:

The Homeschooler

Wow! That was certainly worth more than two cents. I probably would have said, “see a penny, pick it up, and all the day you will have good luck”, and left it at that. Ha ha ha.

The reason that jumped out at me is that I have also said that exact rhyme to my kids when they find pennies on the floor. I must have said it 50 times in the past. But this time I didn’t. Recently, I had been thinking that I don’t want my kids to feel like they’ve already heard everything I’ve ever had to say before. I want to be and continue to be an interesting resource for them. Not long ago, the kids were playing Minecraft together, and Gabriella said to Harry, with regard to something in the game, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” To which Harry replied, “Probably not, since you are completely unpredictable!” I don’t want to be so unpredictable that they feel unsafe, but not so predictable that they tune me out, either. So when the kids found money, all I said was, “Hey cool!” and “That’s great!” From there, I let the conversation develop naturally.

Another example of natural learning happened around the dinner table. My husband was opening a bottle of red wine. The label on the bottle read: Seven Deadly Zins, which quickly led to a discussion of the seven deadly sins. About half way through the meal, Harry whispered in my ear, “Hey Mama! I think the characters in Spongebob Squarepants are based on the seven deadly sins. Mr Krabbs is greed, Patrick is sloth, Squidward is wrath, and Sandy is pride.” I was totally shocked, and at the same time I thought this was pretty great! I don’t think I would have made a connection like that until I was well into my university studies! Despite the fact that Harry at age 8 is only a beginning reader, he is capable of rather advanced literary analysis of the shows he watches. We then spent more time that evening trying to figure out if the rest of the sins were represented in the show. That was a fun conversation that reminded me again that there is so much going on beneath the surface when it might appear that someone is “just” zoning out in front of a “screen.” The mind is always working – absorbing information and connecting it to things already known. Doing things for pleasure are the most educational activities of all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to arrange a trip to tour the Mint. Sylvia Woodman has been thinking and writing about unschooling for more than five years. She spends time on Facebook helping out on several unschooling groups including Radical Unschooling Info and Unschooling Mom2Mom. She is a leader with her local La Leche League Group. Sylvia has been married to her husband Jim for 14 years and they have two children, Gabriella and Harry, who have never been to school. From Harry Potter to Living the Dream continued from page 18

That’s the dream. I’m sure I would have discovered something else. Even those in school scarcely know what they want to do with the rest of their life, I’m lucky that even if I haven’t found what I’m going to do for the rest of mine, I have something so fulfilling to fill the void.

Lissy draws inspiration for her enchanting photos from childish things—tutus and tea parties and battling imaginary dragons—and she enjoys turning those adventures into her art. She likes to take things that are big and scary and put them into a fantasy context so they don’t seem so real. She hopes her photos help people maintain a childlike spirit and persevere in the face of a challenge. Lissy’s images can be seen on several book and album covers, in magazines, in stores, and have even inspired a music video. Her work has been exhibited internationally. One image was the face of the UK National Theatre’s production of Antigone. She has shot ads, editorials, and fashion campaigns and currently has an online presence of over 80,000 followers.

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A month after turning 18, she went to New York City on her own to explore the photography and art community there and see if she’d enjoy city life. She had plans for two months, and ended up staying six. She loved it, and at the end of 2013 she came Lissy receiving the Flickr 20under20 Award home just long enough to complete a US O-1 Extraordinary Ability Visa application, a 700-odd page tome. Still 18, her application was approved for the full three-year term and the afternoon her paperwork arrived by courier, her mom drove her back to NYC for a client meeting the next afternoon.

TEEN TIME Wes Beach

Top Down vs. Bottom Up In my view, public schools aren’t primarily about educating kids, let alone encouraging them to understand and reach their true potential. It’s about creating people who will conform to the demands of authority figures so that the societal status quo will be maintained. Part of this status quo is the school system itself, in which a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach is imposed on students and families. Homeschooling, however, offers an opportunity for bottom-up education, where each young person is at the center of his own education. Public school officials often make misleading and false statements to support their brand of education. In June of 2014, Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, was interviewed on CBS This Morning. Asked about Common Core Standards as one-size-fits-all education, he replied that he doesn’t want one-size-fits-all teaching, that it’s important for each student to utilize strengths, overcome weaknesses, and work on reaching a “high bar.” He neglected to address the fact that it’s the same bar for everyone. He also mentioned that the Common Core Standards were developed by governors and state school officials and were initially voluntarily adopted by more than 40 states. He failed to mention that there are financial incentives provided by the federal government. Duncan pointed out that Common Core Standards are just that, standards, and that states establish curricula. He didn’t point out that content is the central piece of any curriculum; in some definitions, a curriculum is nothing but specified subjects to be studied. In 2011, a local assistant superintendent was quoted in the newspaper as saying that students who want to go to college need to get on a preparatory track at the beginning of high school, and when they reach junior level, it’s too late. This is a false statement. By the time a student in this district becomes a junior, even if he has followed the least academic program recommended by high schools, he will have completed a few college preparatory courses that are also required for graduation. It is possible to plan a two-year program for any student beginning her junior year that will allow her to complete admission requirements for some colleges. Regardless of what a student’s high school record looks like, he can always go to community college, build a solid record, and transfer to a four-year college or university solely on the basis of his community college record. Furthermore, any California student in her junior year can take a state exam, earn a high-school-diploma-equivalent certificate, and begin at community college without finishing high school. Photo Credit: Richard Ballard

The Homeschooler

The person who made the “too late” statement is now district superintendent.

Homeschooling provides opportunities for kid-centered education. In California, education laws allow for almost complete flexibility in homeschooling. Some other states are more restrictive, but ways to be flexible can be found. Here are two stories to demonstrate the freedom that homeschooling affords. Sasha Dobson grew up in a musical family, and decided at age 15 that traditional high school studies were not what she wanted. I provided her with a diploma that was based not on her academic studies, but on her musical accomplishments and talent, and on her desire to move on beyond high school. She spent

Sasha with Norah Jones and Catherine Popper http://pussnbootsmusic.com

some time on partial scholarship at the New School for Social Research in the jazz program. Along with Norah Jones and Catherine Popper, Sasha is a member of the Puss n Boots band. On their album, No Fools, No Fun, Sasha sings and plays acoustic guitar, bass, and drums. In a recent e-mail Sasha wrote, “I stayed for a semester and a half in their jazz program and then took a break. I made most of my connections after I left that school, but a lot of people I went to school with as of recently (17 years later) have been popping back up in my life/career, which feels kind of great. I’m not the only one who is struggling along trying to stabilize a life and career in the arts. Things recently had an upswing of luck but it’s been quite a journey. And not easy. And super challenging over the years being alone. I made such a huge decision as a young adult moving to New York; I still can’t believe it. But things are coming together a little more. And hopefully a little more and a little more and more. By now my survival skills are top shelf, something I could have only learned through experience.” Anna Lorenz began playing the piano at age 2 and began harp lessons at 8. The harp became her instrument of choice, and she developed her talent to a high degree. In pursuit of her goal to attend the prestigious Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, she auditioned with the harp professor and submitted along with her application an eight-page, detailed transcript showing her homeschool studies; this transcript has a lengthy Fine Arts section. She was admitted and began studies at IU in August of 2014. As a homeschooler, Anna completed studies in traditional subjects, not because they were mandated by the state, but because she needed to do so to reach a goal she had chosen herself.

Anna Lorenz, harpist

Wes Beach worked in public schools for 31 years and now directs Beach High School, www.members.cruzio.com. He is also author of Forging Paths: Beyond Traditional Schooling and Opportunities After High School: Thoughts, Documents, Resources.

Reading Math continued from page 19

coordinates graphing system: A Fly on the Ceiling by Julie Glass. Some other books that offer lots of math along with being great read-alouds for younger and older kids are: The Cat in Numberland by Ivar Ekeland and John O’Brien; The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat by Theoni Pappas; and The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Susanne Rotraut. There are many more great reads for older kids, too. Some of the best are the wonderful Murderous Math series of books by Kjartan Poskitt. Other kids might enjoy biographies of mathematicians in Mathematicians are People, Too by Luetta Reimer and Wilbert Reimer, or even Mathematical Scandals by Theoni Pappas.

There are many more books that contain math. If you keep an eye out, you’ll find enough of them at your local library or bookstore to give you lots and lots of opportunities to “read math.” Pam Sorooshian, mom of three grown-up homeschooled daughters, is an economics and statistics college professor and runs a college theater box office in Southern California. She is active in unschooling discussions online, speaks at conferences and currently is serving on the HSC Board of Directors.

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Archimedes and the Door of Science by Jeanne Bendeck describes Archimedes’ mathematical and scientific accomplishments in a captivating story format.

Photo byStacy Conaway

GETTING TECH SAVVY Michelle Conaway

A is for App – Revolutionizing the Way Kids Learn

Handheld devices, smart phones and tablets are the new delivery system with which information is dispersed. While we used to get our information from newspapers, libraries, and books, we can now learn just about anything we want to know simply by touching a screen and finding the information we need in seconds. No more drives to the library, searching through a dictionary, or digging through a flimsy newspaper. Click, click. . . and you’ve got what you need. The development of apps has furthered our ability to hone in on skills that we want to perfect or learn more about. All kids, not just homeschoolers, are presented with new opportunities for learning through apps. So, how can apps help our kids learn? Lets look at ten ways they can improve our kids learning capacities.

1. Interaction and Play

Kids love to interact and play. Whether they’re playing with other kids or an app, kids learn best when they are active participants in the learning process. If it’s fun, they’re more likely to learn it – retain it – and use it in daily life.

2. Easy Access

Apps are easily accessible. No matter what your child wants to learn, you can be sure there’s an app for it. For instance, my son is really interested in the human body and surgery. Guess what! There’s an app for that – one that allows kids to do surgery on all types of body parts (see side bar).

3. Available When the Child is Ready

Apps allow kids to learn things when THEY’RE ready to learn them. No more waiting for a teacher to tell them it’s time to learn xyz. Now kids can learn what they want, when they want, all on their own timing. Want to quiz yourself on some aspect of geography or math? There’s an app for that! Want to have fun learning to spell? There’s an app for that, too.

4. Access to Learning 24/7

Having trouble sleeping? Need to wait in a boring doctor’s office? Grab an app and have fun listening to a story, learning some math, or creating an animated skit. Classrooms are limited to certain hours, but apps are available any time a child wants to learn. You can’t carry books around for everything your child might be interested in, but you can carry around lots of apps for when a mood strikes. The Homeschooler

5. No More Outdated Material

Apps are updated often. If there is updated information, or someone has come up with a more innovative way to deliver the material, a click of a button will update your app usually with no extra cost. With apps, you are more likely to stay abreast of current information, technologies, and events.

6. Learning from Various Points of View

In textbooks and workbooks, children have access to one particular way of learning a subject. With apps, kids can learn from many points of view through many different apps on the same subject. If one doesn’t “click” with your child, another will. Apps allow your child to find what works best for them. No more one way fits all.

7. Most Apps are Free or Inexpensive

If you went to the bookstore or bought curricula in all of the things your child was interested in, you would spend a small fortune. Most apps are free or very inexpensive. You can realistically have hundreds of apps in a variety of subjects for less than the cost of one book.

8. Apps are Multisensory

Kids learn best when they can actively engage in the subject matter with more than one of their senses. Apps integrate auditory, visual, and tactile learning, keeping the child engaged with the material.

9. Learning Made Challenging Through Apps

Kids love a challenge, and when subject material is created in game format, kids will challenge themselves to become better. This type of learning sticks with them, and they are less likely to forget what they have learned.

10. Even the Game Apps are Educational

Okay. So what about the games that seem“not so educational,” like Angry Birds or Arcade Bowl? Well, if you look a little deeper, you might find that even these games are learning opportunities in disguise. My kids have made Angry Bird clay figures and told stories about them. Their motor skills and spatial awareness have improved by trying to win at these games. Education is changing in the world. For many parents, this new way of learning is threatening, because it’s new – we’ve all heard the horror stories about too much screen time. But remember, when books became popular and widespread, they were seen as the demise of thoughtful learning. Apps are just a change in the WAY we learn. It’s a new way that will empower the next generation to be innovative thinkers and learners. Apps are revolutionizing the way we all learn. They’re not a threat. . . just a new beginning. Michelle Conaway lives and learns with her husband, three children and two dogs in Katy, Texas. She started Texas Unschoolers, a Facebook support group for unschooling families. Visit her blogs at www.michelleconaway.net and www.texasunschoolers.com.

Free or Low Cost Apps Re@l Babysitting, Inc. Set up and organize your own babysitting business. Hands On Equations A unique approach to solving equations.

Spell Tower Find words in a jumble of letters to gain points. Unique longer words = higher points. Speed Card game against the computer. Teaches multiples of each number up to 9. Bubble Pop Multiplication An Arcade Game for Math Lovers.

Crapoks-Geo Atlas A fun geography game with maps, monuments, flags, and capitols. The Amazing Digestive Journey Learn about digestion in a fun puzzle for kids to explore. Piiig Labs Science Experiments for Kids. Splash Math All the math kids learn in grades 1 through 5.

Winter 2014 - 2015

SKIT Create and share your own animated video.

Surgery App Series by Alex and/or Jinlong Chen Perform surgery on animated characters. Choose from ear, heart, eye, brain, stomach, and other surgeries.

.... continued from page 17

showed an Australian family whose sons were grown. One had a PhD. Another said he was not a very good reader. The others were in between, on that continuum. “For balance,” a professor was asked for his opinion, and he went off on why unschooling should be illegal and how neglectful the parents were because they had one son Schools can persuade young children that they who read late. Honestly, are so far behind they will never catch up. the late-reading young Schools can make it true. adult son seemed calmer Schools can beat down a hopeful child in such and more sensible than the a way that he will cringe at the sight of books or professor was. libraries for seventy years, if he lives that long.

They have done it a million times. One thing led to another, and I ended up at a Melbourne TV station at 7:00 a.m. that Monday morning for a very brief interview. The same professor had been invited. We weren’t in the same room, but we were in the same building at the same time, and he said he wanted to meet me afterward. What he wanted was to explain (as he had just tried on live national TV, and as he had in the show earlier in the weekend) that no human can possibly learn to read without being taught by a professional educator. I tried to tell him about Holly, he kept interrupting and saying no. The producer assigned to me for the morning was with us; we were standing between the entry and the security desk. The professor I will politely decline to name kept repeating himself, that reading cannot be learned without a highly-trained teacher. I kept trying to slip in bits of my story, because he didn’t want to hear it. When I finally got to the part where Holly finished the book before her friend, he said, “SEE? They taught each other.” I said no they had not, and the next thing Holly had read was Stephen King. He said, “No.” First, the friend still couldn’t read fluently. How did she “teach” Holly to read when she couldn’t even finish a Judy Blume book herself? (As far as we knew, in those days, she never did finish the book.) And IF (just if) she could have taught Holly to read, and Holly had in that same time taught her friend to read, that negates the claimed necessity of having a “highly trained teacher.” (There is a link to the video at SandraDodd.com/readingHSC.) But let’s go back to school.

The Homeschooler

Each person who learns to read learns almost suddenly, at some point. It happens whether he’s in school or not. Before that point, the words are scribbles. After that point, he sees a word and knows what it means, without sounding it out, without looking it up. The scribbles turn to words.

School identifies many tricks and stages before that point, and calls them “reading.” Suppliers of books and materials for schools create “beginning readers” and worksheets to go with them that can create the illusion that a child can read, because words are carefully chosen and sentences are simple and short. A child who “can read” a second- or third-grade reader might not have a clue if you ask her to read an email from Grandma, or an article from a magazine or newspaper. “I can’t read that,” she will say, and it’s true. If it’s beyond the carefully designed reading level she’s working on at school, she doesn’t have the tools. School claims credit for every child who learns to read after he enters school. Schools don’t accept blame for every child who is told he is a non-reader. They don’t see how school itself creates the need for remedial reading, nor how much damage is done by holding children back a grade (or two) because of their reading. It’s always because of reading, and overwhelmingly it’s boys.

Schools can persuade young children that they are so far behind they will never catch up. Schools can make it true. Schools can beat down a hopeful child in such a way that he will cringe at the sight of books or libraries for seventy years, if he lives that long. They have done it a million times. Y’know when people say “Don’t try this at home”? Homeschoolers can do the same kind of damage school does, if they are not Very Careful not to. I have not seen an unschooler fail to read. Enthusiasm and pride will accompany the moment the child can read, regardless of the age, if parents don’t screw it up. Before a child can read, He Cannot Read. Lessons and pressure won’t help. It’s not making sense yet. One day the marks become words, IF he has not been pressured and shamed, rushed and blamed. When Holly could read Stephen King, it was partly because she had a large vocabulary. She knew the words when she saw them. We weren’t limiting her world to “first grade material” when she was six and “second grade material” when she was seven. She was in situations and conversations with people of many ages, about real-world things. She watched movies and television shows, heard things read, that were not designed for “her grade level,” because she never had a grade level. She was living in the world. And when she read, she read as real people read. Early in my unschooling days, others would try to persuade me that my children COULD read, when they couldn’t, because they could tell a McDonald’s logo from Burger King’s, or because they could recognize their own names. In school, those things are “reading readiness” or “reading preparation.” I wasn’t interested in that. My children were busy learning. Part of the reason I and others point and say that unschoolers “read late” is that we bypass all the stages that help justify teachers’ salaries, that help children read where to put their name on a math paper, or what page to turn to in their science books. We call it reading when it is as real and as useful as reading ever gets. People who are unaware that reading is a suddenlyacquired skill imagine, then, that at the age of nine, or eleven, the child will spend a year on first-grade books and phonics exercises, and then a year on second-grade reading and spelling rules, and so forth. They are looking at the world through school-colored glasses. While some children are spending hundreds of hours preparing to read, or practicing little reading “skills,” unschoolers are learning about geography, history, music, art, reasoning, humor and all the things some people thought required reading. How much more behind are those children who have been “studying reading” for a year or five before they read!

Sandra Dodd speaks in public sometimes, but writes every day. She is usually home in New Mexico with her husband, Keith and her now-grown daughter, Holly. Marty will be newly married by the time this issue comes out, and Kirby is considering a move back to New Mexico from Texas in early 2015.

Winter 2014 - 2015

To see the video mentioned, and for links to articles on how unschoolers learn to read, go to SandraDodd.com/readingHSC

DADSPEAK Jon Bach

The “Island Zen” of Alternative Schooling

I’m new to this home/unschooling thing. I have a 7-year-old daughter who stays at home with my wife because, well, she can. As long as we follow the legal requirements in California, she can homeschool.

With my daughter on this “island” of alternative schooling, I feel a kind of peace a parent can only get by knowing their child is free, being who they are, and learning what they want to learn outside of any notion of time and deadlines.

Although it started out as us not knowing where to send our daughter to school, I have quickly learned the power of not choosing formal schooling. I’ve also seen that power in others, and it’s caused me to believe a simple truth: Unschoolers. Just. Are. That’s it. That’s all I want to say.

It’s the most striking feeling I’ve had in reading articles by unschoolers and meeting unschooling families. Unschoolers don’t recruit kids away from school, force their doctrine on others, say their lifestyle is better for people they don’t know, trash others who don’t see it their way, or seem mean, angry, or victimized. No, they are too busy living and learning to get into any of that. They’re making up creative and innovative games, getting together online to share ideas, blogging about what’s working, and conferencing in person. They’re saying, “This is what works for us.” They’re ambitious, relaxed, centered, joyful, in the moment, and moment-to-moment. They’re DIY’ing, Minecrafting, and Facebooking not for escapism, but for what they can learn. The ones with special needs seem to have found validation and congruence outside of school. The ones who tried school feel free to do so, and even to go back if they choose. The ones who grew up outside of school come back to tell their stories about turning out ok, even happier, more appreciative, and more ambitious in their jobs. Many define themselves not in relation to what they did or didn’t do about formal schooling, but how a life of freedom allowed them to create themselves on their own terms. I’m amazed by what my daughter and her unschooling friends have created, how they’re getting along, and what they gravitate toward. I’m impressed with the knowledge and experience of the community of organizers and writers in this magazine – some with years of heavy school and administration experience, who seem peaceful and centered in their writing and when you meet them.

The Homeschooler

I get the nagging feeling that I’m missing something, because Utopia isn’t supposed to be possible. But that is what I have seen at conferences, meet-ups, and park day getogethers, as well as in blogs, books, and Facebook groups. It’s all fun, happy, and peaceful.

Where was all of this when I was a kid? Ah, no matter. It’s enough for me to see it as the purest form of practical Zen in action – the art of being. The feeling reminds me of being on Orcas Island, Washington – a small island in the Pacific Northwest. Go to the island and time stops. Things are quieter, people are friendlier, everyone knows each other, there are few distractions, and nature is in full force. Off the island, there’s traffic, malls, and business – and a feeling that everything needs to be done now. That “mainland” feeling was school for me. I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t given a choice. I thought that’s just what the world was – you went to school because it was the law and

everyone did it. With my daughter on this “island” of alternative schooling, I feel a kind of peace a parent can only get by knowing their child is free, being who they are, and learning what they want to learn outside of any notion of time and deadlines. I think I figured it out, though, this peaceof-unschooling thing... Zen Masters know that a problem is defined as “the difference between what you want and what you get.” If what you want IS what you get, then (by definition) you have no problem. If what you want ISN’T what you get, you have two choices to solve the problem: work on changing what you get, or release the attachment to what you want. That’s why I think alternative schoolers seem centered; unschooling seems to be a lifestyle that maximizes their chances of getting what they want and wanting what they get. That’s my view so far, and the message-in-a-bottle I’d send from this “island” to those on the “mainland”. John Bach is a Quality Manager for eBay in San Jose, CA. His blog, The Dad Report, contains more thoughts like this about unschooling at http://dadreport.wordpress.com.

Education Enterprises Home Schooling with Support Option 1 Curriculum, monthly consultation, and tutoring (as needed) Option 2 2 days a week at home school center w/ teacher supervision Option 3 1 day a week at home school center w/ teacher supervision Coming in August 2015

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Winter 2014 - 2015

Option 4 (when both parents work full time) 5-day teacher supervised home schooling at our center

ASK A HOMESCHOOL THERAPIST Michelle Barone

Key Words and Questions Question: I want to find an easy way to begin introducing reading to my child. She is seven years old and beginning to show some interest. Answer: Being creative with your kids during the process of introducing reading can be very fun and engaging. There are many easy and fun games for all levels of this process. One of my favorites is Key Words. When I was a student in a teaching program at a progressive college, we used a process referred to as Key Words for children 5+ years of age demonstrating an interest in learning to read. When the children wanted to know a particular word – any word that interested them – we would write the word down on 3x5 cards. Some children would draw something on the card to represent that word. The cards were kept in a box that the child had decorated. Sometime during each day, the child would get their box, sit with a teacher and read their words or make new ones. We might add a few ‘sight words’ so they could begin building sentences and stories with their word cards. As a young student teacher, this was one of my first introductions in supporting kids learning to read. Although I have seen and used many ways to support this process, I usually use the foundation of Key Words as a place to start. I used Key Words with my own kids, and they ended up with multiple boxes of words. Over time, we developed many different ways to use these words. They could sort them by first and last letters, rhyming words, parts of speech, catagories, etc. They could make up games and trade cards. The following are some points to keep in mind and explore when thinking about your child reading. Talk about these within your family or support group. * What was your experience of learning to read? What is one of your first memories? What feelings are you still holding about this experience? * Do you think if your child reads later than what you believe is the “right” age, you have done something wrong? What feelings do you have if this is the case?

The Homeschooler

* Are you feeling pressured to teach your child to read? Who is pressuring you?

* Explore your learning style and your child’s. Are they similiar? Differerent? Find ways to teach to your child’ s style. * Learn something totally new yourself, like a foreign language, craft, sport, etc. What do you do if you get frustrated? What kind of help do you like when you learn something new? It is helpful for children to see that learning something new is a process. * Help your child by prepping them with easy answers if they are being quizzed about their reading. Michelle Barone, MA, LMFT, DCEP, is a family therapist in southern California. She offers many levels of support to homeschooling families. For more infomation, to receive her free ezine or for personal consultations, visit her website at http://michellebarone.com.

Enjoy the Flow

PC: JD Weddingphotography

CREATIVELY SPEAKING Roya Dedeaux

I have a Bachelor’s degree in Recreation and Leisure. The first time I heard of the theory of Flow was when my professor said that anyone who could spell Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s name would get extra credit. After earning my 5 extra points, I was invested. As my professor elaborated on Csíkszentmihályi’s theory, I realized I had We are happiest when we are working experienced this “optimal experience” on something we are good at – so many times. My fellow students but just at the edge of our skill level. were taking notes like it was the first We want to succeed, after trying hard. time the concept had ever crossed their mind, while I was excited to have a name for this feeling I had encountered on so many occasions. Throughout my undergraduate degree, I realized that so much of leisure studies was overlapping with my unschooling philosophy. Rec and leisure is a field that tries to help adults recognize the importance of their free time, the benefits of their recreation activities, and validate the state of mind known as leisure. Therapeutic recreation specialists help people learn how to engage in “healthy recreation behavior,” among other things, and professionals in the field spend countless hours trying to explain to those outside of it that yes, doing something for the intrinsic satisfaction of it is a worthwhile pursuit. I remember feeling relief that I was studying a field that made so much sense to me, and also deep feelings of sadness that it takes so many people so many years to give their interests validation. When I went on to get my Master’s in Counseling, Csíkszentmihályi’s showed up again, this time as my professors talked about the field of positive psychology. Again, my fellow students scribbled notes while I wondered why it was that so few people seem to be able to tap into this optimal experience. In the wonderful book Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal talks about “blissful productivity.” She sites studies that have shown that although we think we are happiest when we take breaks, relax, and rejuvenate (sunbathing, days at the spa, lying around...) we are actually happiest when we are productively engaged in something we are choosing (Janemcgonigal.com for all of her research). I have found this personally to be true, and also true for the students I teach and the counseling clients I work with. There are a few key elements here. The first is that you need choice. You can’t get to this bliss when someone else is making you do something. It has to be an activity that is intrinsically motivated, and something you want to work on. So if happiness is your goal for your children, think about that. The second is production. We like it better when we are working! Jane McGonigal eloquently writes, as does Csíkszentmihályi, that we are happiest when we are working on something we are good at but just at the edge of our skill level. We want to succeed, after trying hard.

Roya Dedeaux is a Marriage and Family Therapist Intern who has been homeschooled most of her life. She has a Master’s degree in Counseling, and specializes in art and experiential therapies. Roya is also available through email correspondence assisting homeschoolers all over the world. Find out more at www.royadedeaux.com.

Winter 2014 - 2015

I think about the times I am happiest – usually working on some collage or knitting project. I have time (an essential factor to Flow theory) to become totally absorbed in this activity of my choosing. I lose track of time. I hear parents worry frequently about how many hours their children spend on something, and yet this is an important part of finding that “optimal experience.” So if this sounds familiar, parents, put away that worry.

THE HANDWRINGERS Diane Kallas and Barbara Alward

Learning Curves The worst part of teaching our kids to read was the drooling. That, and the tantrums, complete one memorable evening, with pitching Hop on Pop across the living room into the cat. And the interminable, incessant, shrill and demanding whining.

We’re pretty sure the whole time they were thinking, “Gosh, I’m glad we plan on having only one mother, because this ‘teaching’phase’ is horrible.”

Oh, we tried not to whine and throw things, but it was the only way we could get their attention. You see, between their ages of four and six, we never read anything to our kids without devolving into phonetic abuse. You’ve done it, too: at the suspenseful dénouement of Where’s Spot?, the crucial moment where you discover Spot’s perplexing whereabouts, you fall into that feeble, stumbling cadence where every word takes longer to say than pa-pa-pa-ah-ah-ah-ah-ppppppp-corn takes to ma-ma-ma-icrowave. Mostly, your kids just ignore you. Or if you are lucky, they roll their eyes, proving they are still alive inside. Some kids – those destined for the helping professions – kindly, gently close the picture book, as if you are too delicate and they are quietly hopeful that someday your fever will break. Our kids tolerated this unfortunate developmental stage that we were in, but it was painful for them. We’re pretty sure the whole time they were thinking, “Gosh, I’m glad we plan on having only one mother, because this ‘teaching’ phase is horrible.”

The Homeschooler

We wouldn’t have drooled as much as we did if they’d just been a bit more forthcoming about their learning process. I remember pointing to “black cat” printed under a stereotypical black cat and asking my not-yet-reading son, “What does that say?” (complete with cheerful, teacherly lilt on “that”), and he answered, “Burmese croissant” (we lived in Berkeley where biscotti were plentiful), and I immediately started to panic. How could he think that? Was he braindamaged or merely insane?! Had I dropped him on his head more times than the pediatrician allowed? And now, here comes the drool, because I was obviously the dumbest person on the planet to think that he was the one not catching on, when clearly it was my husband who didn’t get the whole unschooling reading thing.

But they all eventually figured it out for themselves, leading us to suspect that if you can read this, you should thank your mother for eventually giving up on you. Sometimes, it takes longer than you think it should. Sometimes, your kid reaches eight or twelve or forty-five and still isn’t reading, and you begin to wonder if he ever will. You think that homeschooling was a terrible mistake, it is bad and you are mad and sad or planning to marry her off to a cad or to teach her to fish for shad or knit plaid – anything that doesn’t require reading. And then, one day, she comes up to you, Calvin and Hobbes in hand (it is always this book, unless it is Chilton’s Auto Repair Manual), and reads the strip to you, smooth as a professional auctioneer. And then she looks up and says, “I don’t get the joke,” and you realize it is time to start sounding out science. Handwringers Barbara and Diane continue to find humor in every day life. Their original Handwringer column ran in every issue of HSC’s California Homeschooler from 1997-2002. Between them they have four children ranging from 21 to 30, each uniquely charming and living in the real world.

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