Raising Children

[Alisa]

Hello fellow mums and dads, I am the mother of a 6 year old boy. We are essentially unschooling; the hardest part is trusting the process but the journey is engaging and edifying. He is not reading yet but I love to read and I’ve been buying books for him since he was conceived. Plus, I’ve passed on books I kept from childhood or that I bought for sentimental reasons as an adult.

When he was a baby (from three months) and a captive audience, we read him Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree series, The Secret Garden, The Wizard of Oz, Heidi; the original stories. He currently has a huge personal library but we’ve read all that he wants to read there right now (Harry Potter and some Great Illustrated Classics not touched yet). The public library is a great resource for new-to-us stories and books. Most recently, he has read all of the Dragon Masters series (1-20) and he’s gone through Archie comics that I kept from the 1990s.

I was wondering if any of you are passionate about books and reading to your children/sharing the joy of reading. Do share anything that you do in this regard. We have been doing the public library vacation times’ reading challenges. He likes getting prizes and I like the activities. They have helped him advance his writing.

I am also an author and have self-published three children’s animal-themed story books. As I am Trinidadian (in the Caribbean), the animals and stories are indigenous to my island. There are animals like the ocelot, fruit bat and the capybara (from South America). The books are available on Amazon to anyone who thinks they might be a good addition to their library and maybe an opportunity to learn a little bit about a new place. Two are nocturnal stories and the newest, That Amazing Capybara, is set in the daytime with diurnal animals.

Discussion

[Amber]

My kids are grown now, but I so wish I would have unschooled them! Congratulations on your decision! Your books look amazing, congratulations! Way to follow your heart! ♥️

[Alisa]

Thanks, Amber. I found out about unschooling before I had my son from a Trini mom who was doing it and it blew my mind. It made me think about all the school trauma I still held and everything wrong with the system and realise I could do something different when I had my child. Natural progression from attachment parenting too.

[Ife]

Hi Alisa, that’s so cool that you have published children’s books! I’m excited to look into them. We have a 4 year old and a 1 year old and we are essentially unschooling too. I love Naomi Aldort’s (the author of Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves) advice around children reading which is that the later they read the stronger their memory actually becomes. So we’ve been trying to be very gentle around reading with our sons. But we also love to read and really enjoy books like Flossie and the Fox by Rachel Isadora and Earth Mother by Ellen Jackson. And it’s been really interesting observing my 4 year old getting into reading. He’s really into the graphic novel Avatar books by Gene Luen Yang and we’ll get a few from the library at a time and kind of leave them with him for a few days and read them to him at night and after us reading them, sometimes only once, we’ll listen to him read them outloud when he’s on the potty or just chilling and hear him using the cues of the pictures to reiterate what we’ve said. As if he’s memorizing the book. Eventually, after a while he’ll be able to read the entire books almost word for word from memory. And since they are library books, after a while we’ll start over with a new part of the series and he’ll do it over again. It’s been suuuper interesting!

[Alisa]

Hi Ife, thanks for your message! Yes, I have experienced boys’ inclination towards graphic novels, too. My son has one now (How the leopard got its Spots) and he pulls it out from time to time and has me read it to him. Then there are the Archie comics.

Thanks for that Naomi Aldort book recommendation. I feel like I live that stuff right now. It is quite the journey, stepping away from how I was raised to give my son a voice and realising what behaviours trigger me.

Regarding unschooling, I just finished reading Peter Gray’s Free to Learn. I feel like everything I read before was anecdotal. Good in its own right : Sandra Dodd, John Holt, The Unschooling Unmanual; these people raised children to adulthood. As my son gets older and remains outside the school system, though, I wanted the scientific and anthropological backing for what I am doing. What I realised from reading it is that children really need other children of various ages for it to work well. That has always been difficult to achieve with one child, his cousins are in school (and very much schooled) and I don’t have much of a community nearby. But it has bolstered me to create opportunities with children so I’m working on that right now.

Thanks for the Flossie and the Fox recommendation. I hadn’t seen that one before.

[Erin]

I unschool my 6 and 9 year old daughters and I have also found Peter Gray’s work to be so helpful in supporting my decision to do so.

We started our girls in Waldorf education, but once the plandemic hit and masking came into their school we knew we had to pull them out. We tried various Waldorf and nature based homeschool curriculums and some standard workbook learning at first, but none of it was a good fit for our family. Then I found Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan’s Luminous Children’s Summit where she interviewed Dr. Peter Gray and what he and others on her summit shared resonated so much.

Our lives have become much more joyful ever since we made this shift and I feel confident that my girls are learning in every moment without any formal education (unless they request it then I am happy to provide resources).

For instance, we found CoherenceEducation.org where we are taking online classes that my girls are interested in. For example, Ancient Civilizations where they get to use critical thinking and discuss ideas like the pyramids being built using sound and vibration, Animal Communication where they get to learn how to telepathically communicate with animals and a Lucid Dreaming course.

We thought for a time our 9 year old was dyslexic, but after learning from Peter Gray that the typical age of unschoolers to become readers is between the ages of 4-14, that worry has dissolved. She loves to be read to, but isn’t interested in reading on her own yet so we don’t force it. Once we stopped forcing it she started asking to read occasionally and we found that using color strips in blue or violet have corrected any suspected dyslexic issues as well.

We also appreciate Steiner’s approach to early childhood education and don’t impose any formal reading or math on our 6 year old has he doesn’t believe they are developmentally ready for that until age 7.

One of our favorite children’s story right now is Fiona the Firefly. It has a beautiful message and I highly recommend!

My 9 year old prefers me to read her more advanced books so right now we are reading Visions of Atlantis by Michael Le Flem and next up is K9 Spirit Guides by Heather Leigh Strom (I just met her at an event yesterday and she is a wonderful human!)

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by  Erin.

[Alisa]

Hi Erin, thanks for sharing that website! It has the kind of courses our children should be participating in. We were doing book work with our son and it was a struggle because he had no interest in the content. Yet, he taught himself to tell time at age 5 when we got him a watch at his request. So I definitely see that when the interest is there, he will learn what is required.

[Erin]

My daughters learned to tell time from an old, battery operated analog clock. It’s so simple, but they love it! It’s the simple things in daily life that teach us the most I am realizing more and more through my children.

[Ari]

H

[Erin]

Hi Ari, in Colorado you are required to register your children as homeschoolers with any county in the state (doesn’t have to be the one you live in). You agree to teach your children a certain number of hours and particular subjects. Then starting in 3rd grade and continuing every other year through 11th grade they either have to take a state standardized exam OR you can pay a licensed teacher to review your children’s work and they sign a document saying you are meeting those requirements which you provide to the county. My oldest is in 3rd grade this year and we plan to hire a teacher this summer to review as that is the better option in my opinion. We unschool and practice self directed learning so a standardized test is not an option for us. If you go to your state department of education’s website you should find all homeschool requirements specific for your state. I wish we didn’t have to go along with any of this, but for now we are playing by there rules to keep our kids out of their indoctrination camps masquerading as schools.

[Ari]

n

[Mike]

Curious if anyone has found good history books for older kids similar to what Tuttle Twins have made? As far as I know, there is nothing really out there. We were pretty happy with the Tuttle Twins books but they are more for younger 3rd-5th grade. Thanks!

[Mike]

Tim on Telegram just shared these!

The Story of the World vol 4 (moderately Christian perspective) and corresponding workbook

– What Really Happened in Colonial Times

– Several books in the Uncle Eric Series by Richard Maybury

– The Copy Work Book – George Washington Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior (learning history through penmanship practice)

– Presidents of the United States practice cursive handwriting with quotes from US presidents (learning history through penmanship practice)

– The American Experience storybook by Copper Lodge library

– New World Echoes by Jennifer Courtney (more advanced)

– Our Constitution Rocks by Juliette Turner

– A Little History of the World by Gombrich (only read the chapters that relate to the period you are studying)

[Ari]

🙂

[Author]

Replies