Learning Outsiders

The End and the Beginning

My youngest daughter started school today, aged 13. Both of my children now go to school so, in many ways, our unschooling journey is at an end.

I guess unschooling doesn’t strictly mean not going to school: unschooling is about being learner-led. Going to…

Code, Discovery and Learning

A couple of days ago my girls suddenly decided to learn coding.

Story Times

I asked a question on Twitter earlier today about historical novels for my eldest daughter (she’s thirteen).

SNOFCOIN: Creating Physical Tokens

Today we spent some time manufacturing our first physical “coins”. We’ve been thinking about how to…

Making a Maths Field Kit

Tuning In

When you approach things from an unschooling perspective you’re used to tuning in—listening to what interests your children and what they want to explore. But you also start to tune into the world more yourself.

Feel of Failure

There’s a lot of theory about failure and how good/useful/essential it is, but like many educational concepts it’s one of those things that hangs around at the back of my head: I might agree with its importance even if I haven’t given it a lot of thought on a personal level.

Learning Loops

Yesterday my youngest daughter showed me the latest blog post she was working on (it’s about poisonous animals). She’s been writing it on the iPad and my initial suggestion was that she should try writing it on a laptop so that the keyboard was easier to use. Her response was that she preferred the…

Pointless Fun

The recent launch of Pokemon Go has spawned the inevitable rash of articles about how how we can harness the game’s popularity for all sorts of alternative outcomes, but most irritating of all perhaps is the way the formal education community has sought to use it as a way of (and there’s no nicer way I…

Needs and Contexts

A year and a half ago we made the decision to move to another country; we relocated for all sorts of reasons but chief among them was the intention of providing our children with a new context: a different culture, language, place to learn.

Unschooling School

The more articles I read about the future of schools, the more it seems to me that what everyone thinks would be good for children is what unschoolers are already doing and in fact have been doing for several decades.

The Farming Metaphor

The language of education frequently references the language of farming: sowing the seeds, cultivating, the latest crop of students. And why not? The fertile ground of children’s minds makes some sense as a frame for how we see learning.

An Imaginary Conversation With My Children About What Google Wants Them To Do With Their Future

The Emergent Syllabus

For a while I’ve been meaning to write something about the emergent syllabus of unschooling. In other words I’ve started to think about what themes we keep revisiting as my children explore their own interests.

Learning Muscles

Weight training works by pushing muscles to breaking point and then allowing them to recover, and grow. Formal education doesn’t work this way. It supports and guides, providing children with a safe environment to acquire knowledge.