Immerse Yourself

What I have noticed about our children is that when they find something they are interested in, they like to immerse themselves in it. Do you do that? I do. Maybe we all do, when we get the chance.

When I was learning how to do website design, I spent hours learning HTML code. My mom often questioned why I was spending so much time on something that wasn't bringing in money. (I was about 35 at the time and worked at home on my computer doing medical transcribing). Funny thing is that later I landed two great-paying jobs because of my computer/web skills, though that hadn't been my reason for spending so many hours learning about website design. I was learning because I liked it, because that is what I chose to do at the time. Time flew by as I learned how to change colors and fonts, add images, make tables, and fool around with various designs.

Lately our children have been immersing themselves in video games (Halo and Minecraft), movies/TV shows (X-Men and Rugrats), soccer (Dante played on 3 different teams this season!), parkour skills (Eli and Avery) and rollerblading (Emily and Sophia). Of course, they still partake of their regularly scheduled events, like violin and guitar lessons, horseback riding, and nature classes, but during the day, when they have nothing else scheduled, they spend hours immersing themselves in these activities.

And what I love about our unschooling life, is that they can.

There is no bell ringing every 50 minutes to move to the next subject or the next building, a new teacher, or whatever. They have no artificially imposed interruptions to their own rhythms. I love that they have the time to immerse themselves and get in the flow that comes from being so engaged in learning/doing something so meaningful (to them).

I also love that they can do it just because they want to, and not with the intention of later having to do something with it - pass a test, get a job, build a career...

Sometimes people worry about children (and adults) being addicted to TV or video games or obsessed with horses or Barbie dolls (or whatever - you fill in the blank), but I see that our children immerse themselves into a variety of activities, and when they have their fill, they move on. Sometimes they move on after a short immersion experience (a day or two), and sometimes their interests become passions, and they continue for years.

When Eli (now 13) was 6 and Avery (now 11) was 4 they were totally into BMX racing. We drove 1 hour (each-way) to Port Angeles two or three times per week so they could practice and race. We traveled throughout Washington, Colorado, New Mexcio and California to race. They amassed a HUGE amount of trophies and Eli won the Washington State Championship race when he was 10. He was ranked 3rd overall in the state for that year. Avery won many BIG races and was 7th in the state for his age (8 at the time) that same year. After about 4 years of pretty intense BMX racing seasons, and after having both become Experts (winning over 35 races to pass through beginner and intermediate designations. Eli wants me to tell you that he won way more than 35 races.), they decided to move on to other interests (mountain biking, skiing, soccer). They loved BMX racing while they did it, and then they were ready to try something new.

I love immersing myself in my own interests (right now it is Words with Friends on Facebook pretty much every night until midnight!) and I most certainly love being witness to the variety of experiences the children decide to pursue, whether it is for a few hours, a few days, a few years or their lifetime!

Here is a very short video of Emily and some friends rollerblading around the kitchen/living room. They have been doing this daily for hours. Emily is in the middle. Eli is at the computer. He's their DJ.



Here is a slideshow that shows the kids involved in various activities that were really important to them during the past couple of years. They are older now: Eli (13), Avery (11), Sophia (10), Dante (9) and Emily (8). Some of these things they still do, and others are just sweet memories. Activities include: cake decorating, Lego animation, building with Lego blocks, soccer, skiing, BMX racing, trampoline, dressing up, swords, playing at the beach, and welding.



ADDED BONUS: While Eli and I were making this slideshow, we discovered a new musician Chris Joss, whose song "I Want Freedom" plays during the slideshow. Great beats on his site - check him out!

Living (and Learning) as an Alternative to Educational Reform

Before I had children, I worked for 5 years as a bilingual elementary school teacher in Fresno, California. Both my maternal grandmother and mother were elementary school teachers, 20 and 40 years respectively. I have heard a lot about educational reform over the years, and I am still hearing it, pretty much daily. It is all over the internet, in the news, on ballots, and on people's minds.

There is some good information out there to help people understand how our brains work and therefore what types of experiences really promote learning - and it is definitely NOT what is still happening in many schools these days.

Here is an example of such information that I came across today via some postings on Facebook - an animated video entitled Born to Learn.



Unfortunately, even with such clear information, people are stuck in still trying to reform schools and the "educational system". Why must we continue to separate learning from life, almost as if they had nothing to do with each other? Living is learning, and education doesn't "prepare" you for life because you are already living life.

At this time in human evolution we don't know what the future will hold, so it is important to encourage and support the creativity, curiosity and intense internal drive to make meaning of the world around them that children naturally have - and NOT KILL IT.

You probably know first hand what killing it feels like and looks like in your own life (and luckily if you are reading this blog you regained it somehow, probably by having children of your own). Some of what killed it for me included being tested, compared to others, kept indoors, and held at a certain grade level working on curriculum that I found tedious and boring, and frankly, too easy, not to mention having to spend hours each day with teachers who really didn't care what I wanted to learn or what might be happening to me because of such indifference and inability to deal with individual student concerns, passions and interests.

With so many people talking about reforming schools and the problems of our educational system, I just sit here in gratitude to John Holt and the many other pioneering homeschoolers and unschoolers who have shown us another way. They didn't need any research scientists to tell them about brain development, they just looked at what works for humans and did that, namely connection to each other, freedom, respect, love, fun, passion, play, exploration, time and well, simply put, life being lived.

I hope more people stop worrying about test scores and such and get back to living and learning, and realize that this is all there is.

Play, explore, discover, create, live, learn, grow, enjoy - repeat until you die - and then go somewhere else and do it all over again - perhaps.

Some photos of us living and learning over the past two years.

Emily and Sophia looking at books at our local library.




Eli had an interest in cake decorating for several years, and so my mom took them to a place in Fresno, CA (where she lives) so he and Avery could learn how to decorate with fondant.



The kids love to sleep outside. They know how to make fire by friction safely and how to stay warm outside, even in the cold weather of Washington.




Emily and Sophia spend most of their days creating. Here they are working on some sewing projects.



Shelter building on the beach is always a favorite way to pass a few hours. Sometimes they create entire villages.



Avery found a turtle on a trip to Victoria, B.C. with his nature class. The nature class is made up of about 12 homeschoolers who meet once per week for 4 to 5 hours with two local nature mentors. He loves it!

Back to Blogging

Okay, so I have been away from the blogosphere for a while, and now I am back.

My three children (now 13, 11 and 8) have been unschooled their entire lives. Most recently we have embraced the "radical unschooling" approach, which to me means that as a parent I trust my children's interests and preferences in all areas of life and view the act of living as an act of learning. That is, we are learning all the time, whether we are reading, playing, using media, being outside, inside, talking, listening, and on and on. This means we no longer limit media or control their food choices, which is something we had done in the past.

I recently got back into the Unschooling Circles: chatting with Dayna Martin on FB, joining Sandra Dodd's Always Learning Yahoo Group, and reading Sandra's Big Book of Unschooling, and registering for our second Life Is Good Conference in Vancouver, WA. All of this was getting my blogging juices flowing, but it wasn't until I saw this segment on Unschooling on the Today Show that I decided to blog once again about our experiences as an unschooling family. (I blogged about our unschooling life years ago, but that blog was deleted.)

The commentary on this segment showed such a general lack of understanding about what living and learning is all about that I decided I wanted to share our unschooling experiences with others so that people who are open-minded and interested have examples of people living and learning and loving life. There are many other blogs where families share their unschooling lives and I appreciate so many of them. I hope that this blog will be a welcome addition to the Unschooling Blogs because unschooling certainly is a viable parenting and educational option for many, and people need to know that it exists - and that it works (whatever that means).

So, here we go - the life of a regular unschooling family. Well, maybe not so "regular", but you'll read more about that as this project moves along.

It's two healthy unschooling boys - Eli (13) and Avery (11).