Books Are My Drug

I have an addiction. And I don't wanna get better. My addiction is books! So this post is to mention some of my favorites for kids and adults.
First, the baby set. The little adorable plump love bundle set!
I love the board books of Charley Harper's ABC's and 123's. Charley Harper was a naturalist and an author. Check out his work at http://charleyharper.com/. I also enjoy Nikki McClure's from A to Nap. You can see her work here http://www.nikkimcclure.com/. and of course, board books of Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle are always nice!
As far as picture books go, my current favorites are Wave by Suzy Lee, A Dignity of Dragons by Jaqueline K. Ogburn, and Nicolas, Where Have you Been? by Leo Lionni.
For second graders The Sisters Grimm series is really popular. They are fairy tale detectives, and have magical fun solving crime.
For middlers I have enjoyed a series of mysteries by Blue Balliet (currently the Middle School Mystery Club at Nightbird Books is reading them). Chasing Vermeer, The Wright 3, and The Calder Game. They all involve puzzles, codes, and art!
Also The Book of Elsewhere by Jacqueline West is a new one that is gret for upper middlers (10-12 year olds)
Of course there are a lot of teen novels out there, but Alice in Wonderland is a perennial favorite. Also The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier.
And for us older folks; Serena by Ron Rasch was a lush, suspenseful surprise. And Just Kids, Patti Smith's transcendent memoir about her early days in New York City with fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe is the best book I have read this year. Beautiful!
For now that is all I can post...there is a book calling my name. You can, if you are in fayettevlle, find these and more at Nightbird Books!

Call me Tex

Arlo wants me to change my name to Tex. "Isn't that a cool name, Mama?"
In other news, we are still learning and growing together. We are all sort of catching the tide of Sol's Shakespeare kick, our Netflix queue is full of biographies and documentaries on the bard, as well as performances of several plays. I ordered the Usborne Stories of Shakespeare, a beautiful hardback book that turns the plays into stories for kiddos. This will make Aley happy, since she is obsessed with reading Romeo and Juliet! They will be our bedtime reading for awhile. Sol's reader friendly copy of Hamlet is here, and that is prett neat. Shakespearian text on one page, translation into modern English on the right.
Sol watched Nova, his favorite PBS program last night, whle the rest of us splashed in the pool. It was about cuttlefish, odd little guys! After the kids went to bed, I added tons of Nova DVDs to our Netflix.
I love unschooling. We all unschool. We all pursue our interests and take time to smell the roses!
I asked Arlo what kind of books he wanted me to get him from Nightbird, and he said,"Books about animals. Hippopotamus, turtle, all the animals"
Life is good. And life is for learning.

Good times...

Last night we had a semi-large gathering of folks at our house, including twelve kiddos, and it was downright awesome. The kids splashed in the pool, the adults had long deep talks, a gaggle of girls went to our blackberry patches twice and came back with baskets of berries that were gobbled up right there on the deck by the little tribe. On Saturday, while I was working, Cheyne and the kids siphoned pond water to fill up our three foot pool, so we didn't have to use our well water. Talk about a learning experience! All of the kids expressed amazement that water could move like that.
There is just a sense of harmony, of syncing with each other, that has been missing from our little nest.
It is a really great beginning!
And does anything taste more like summer than a fresh, ripe blackberry, picked by a child?

Everyday

We are still enjoying our relaxed approach to learning. We jumped into the pool for a late night swim, and saw a frog up close, and heard it's loud sound and saw it's big air sac filling up. We laughed, splashed, and looked at the stars. Learning through life, the best way.

We get along better lately too. Giving the kids more respect and focusing on loving each other and learning together has given us a new perspective that has made us all breathe easier and sharpened our focus on who we want to be and what life is all about.

John Holt Says...

John Holt Quotes John Holt's answer to the following question:

Q. Will they have the opportunity to overcome or do things that they think they don't want to do?

A. I'm not sure what this question means. If it means, will unschooled children know what it is to have to do difficult and demanding things in order to reach goals they have set for themselves, I would say, yes, life is full of such requirements. But this is not at all the same thing as doing something, and in the case of school usually something stupid and boring, simply because someone else tells you you'll be punished if you don't. Whether children resist such demands or yield to them, it is bad for them. Struggling with inherent difficulties of a chosen or inescapable task builds character; merely submitting to superior force destroys it.~John Holt~ Teach Your Own

"I have used the words "home schooling" to describe the process by which children grow and learn in the world without going, or going very much, to schools, because those words are familiar and quickly understood. But in one very important sense they are misleading. What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth in the word is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn't a school at all. " ~John Holt~ Teach Your Own

"What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgement, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them."

~John Holt~ Teach Your Own

"Of course, a child may not know what he may need to know in ten years (who does?), but he knows, and much better than anyone else, what he wants and needs to know right now, what his mind is ready and hungry for. If we help him, or just allow him, to learn that, he will remember it, use it, build on it. If we try to make him learn something else, that we think is more important, the chances are that he won't learn it, or will learn very little of it, that he will soon forget most of what he learned, and what is worst of all, will before long lose most of his appetite for learning anything."

~John Holt~ Teach Your Own

"We who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it with very little adult coercion or interference, are probably no more than one percent of the population, if that. And we are not likely to become the majority in my lifetime. This doesn't trouble me much anymore, as long as this minority keeps on growing. My work is to help it grow. "

~John Holt~ Teach Your Own

"I can't help noting that no cultures in the word that I have ever heard of make such a fuss about children's bedtimes, and no cultures have so many adults who find it so hard either to go to sleep or wake up. Could these social facts be connected? I strongly suspect they are."

~John Holt~ Teach Your Own

"I think children need much more than they have of opportunities to come into contact with adults who are seriously doing their adult thing, not just hanging around entertaining or instructing or being nice to children. They also need much more than they have of opportunities to get away from adults altogether, and live their lives free of other people's anxious attention."

~John Holt ~ in a letter to Joan Pitkin, October 22, 1971
From: "A Life Worth Living, Selected Letters of John Holt",
Edited by Susannah Sheffer

"About reading, children learn something much more difficult than reading without instruction - namely, to speak and understand their native language. I do not think they would or could learn it if they were instructed. I think reading instruction is the enemy of reading. "

~John Holt ~ in a letter to Joan Pitkin, October 22, 1971
From: "A Life Worth Living, Selected Letters of John Holt",
Edited by Susannah Sheffer

"Living is learning and when kids are living fully and energetically and happily they are learning a lot, even if we don't always know what it is. "

~John Holt ~ in a letter to Joan Pitkin, October 22, 1971
From: "A Life Worth Living, Selected Letters of John Holt",
Edited by Susannah Sheffer

"If we continually try to force a child to do what he is afraid to do, he will become more timid, and will use his brains and energy, not to explore the unknown, but to find ways to avoid the pressures we put on him."

~John Holt~, (1923-1985) American Educator, How Children Learn

"Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them"

~John Holt~, (1923-1985) American Educator, How Children Fail

"The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense ... School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning."

~John Holt~, (1923-1985) American Educator, How Children Learn

"We teachers - perhaps all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else. Perhaps once in a thousand times, when the explanation is extraordinary good, and the listener extraordinary experienced and skillful at turning word strings into non-verbal reality, and when the explainer and listener share in common many of the experiences being talked about, the process may work, and some real meaning may be communicated. Most of the time, explaining does not increase understanding, and may even lessen it."

~John Holt~, (1923-1985) American Educator, How Children Learn

"Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders. "

~John Holt~ Teach Your Own

"What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out."

~John Holt~ Teach Your Own

"The modern world is dangerous, confusing, not meant for children, not generally kind or welcoming to them. We have much to learn about how to make the world more accessible to them, and how to give them more freedom and competence in exploring it. But this as a very different thing from designing nice little curricula."

~John Holt~ Teach Your Own

“There must be a way to educate young children so that the great human qualities that we know are in them may be developed. But we’ll never do it as long as we are obsessed with tests. At faculty meetings we talk about how to reward the thinkers in our classes. Who is kidding whom? No amount of rewards and satisfactions obtained in the small group thinking sessions will make up to Monica for what she felt today, faced by a final test that she knew she couldn't do and was going to fail.

"Pleasant experiences don’t make up for painful ones. No child, once painfully burned, would agree to be burned again, however enticing the reward. For all our talk and good intentions, there is much more stick than carrot in school, and while this remains so, children are going to adopt a strategy aimed above all else at staying out of trouble. How can we foster a joyous, alert, wholehearted participation in life if we build all our schooling around the holiness of getting 'right answers'?”

~John Holt~ How Children Fail

“We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any.”

~John Holt~ How Children Fail

“It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives.”

~John Holt~ How Children Fail

“A child only pours herself into a little funnel or into a little box when she’s afraid of the world—when she’s been defeated. But when a child is doing something she’s passionately interested in, she grows like a tree—in all directions. This is how children learn, how children grow. They send down a taproot like a tree in dry soil. The tree may be stunted, but it sends out these roots, and suddenly one of these little taproots goes down and strikes a source of water. And the whole tree grows."

~John Holt~ Learning All the Time

So Far....

Sol and I looked up pi, both the Greek letter and numeric wunderkind. We also looked up the Fibonacci sequence. All pretty much over his head mathematically, but it sated his interest for now. Aley and I wrote a letter to Turpentine Creek full of her questions about tigers. Arlo is doing his sounds and we have started playing math games (Go Janice Van Cleave) together when he feels like it. Ivy is reading all the time and thinking a lot about horses. We love the board game Tweedledum, a gorgeous Alice in Wonderland board game we found at a thrift store a ouple of years ago. We watch Nova and Nature and have long talks, especially Arlo and I. Lately he wants to know all about how trees help us breathe. So I answer as best I can and look for a book.
The number one thing is I am NOT a teacher, I am a facilitator. They are working so much out for themselves, it is downright inspiring. It encourages me to put my heart into my own passions. We all talk about that, "following a calling", "pursuing your dreams", "do what you love"....but then we wind up either sucked into the same old route as our peers, or ill equipped to do those things because we have multiple choiced our instincts and intuition into oblivion. I am watching my kids daily gain the confidence to pursue knowledge, to remain inspired, and to believe that learning is EVERYWHERE, and exciting, and fulfilling, and neverending.
It is so cool.

Who Are You?

So, a little bit about myself....I am Candice, I am 32 years old, I live in the Boston Mountains on 60 acres with my husband Cheyne and four children, Sol, age 11, Ivy, age 9, Aley, age 7, and Arlo, age 4. We have homeschooled before and done the public school thing, but in our hearts we always knew unschooling was a really solid fit for our family. I work part time at the best independent bookstore in the world, Nightbird Books, in Fayetteville, twenty minutes away. My husband is a trim carpenter and also makes wooden toys. We spend a lot of time hanging out with friends of all ages, particularly from our church, Vintage Fellowship, an emerging church in Fayetteville.

I love to read. Voracious is an understatement for my reading habits! My children are book lovers as well.

This is a new adventure for our family.We are stoked!

Day One

So today was the first day of "the brave new world", in which I let my children be in control of their education. Full time. Gulp.

So I thought I would include a few of our unconventional learning "happenings" of the day, just for posterity's sake, and as a sweet sort of record of the evolution of our family.

Aley and Arlo in the backseat-

Arlo: What IS a fossil.

Aley: A fossil is like a bone buried deep in the ground.

Arlo: Our bodies are full of fossils?

Aley: No, Arlo, fossils are like bones from dinosaurs that are very very VERY old.

Me, taking a deep breath-

Me: So , what do you think of this whole unschooling thing?

Sol: I think it is good, because I can, like, learn things at my own pace. Like I like to study about something until I am all the way done with it and then move on to something else.

I think I want to read Hamlet.

Me: What about math? Is that something you wanna focus on right now?

Sol: Not really...I kinda just want to learn about pi.

Me:We can do that

The drive home ended with Aley wanting to write a letter to the woman who founded Turpentine Creek to ask her al about big cats, and Ivy napping in the back seat after exhausting herself with 30 minutes of karaoke at my mom's house followed by devouring the latest issue of Stone Soup magazine.

This folks, is how the learning happens for us.

I feel so inspired....