Blog #27 “Evanesco” Harry Potter

November 21, 2014

I have been reading the Harry Potter series out loud to my kids for the past 2.5 years. One book at a time, one word after the other. Well we finished the entire series earlier this month. We were so excited to finish that we read the last 100 pages in two day. We were also motivated because they just re-released the movies out in our local movie theater, showing one a week starting in October. They kids were thrilled because I didn’t l...

Blog #26 sometimes we fail

November 17, 2014

One of the hardest things about being an unschool mom is watching your kids fail. It’s probably the hardest thing for all moms, but when you are home with them all day, you need to let them fail. Somehow our American parenting style as come so full circle that it just doesn’t allow kids to feel uncomfortable, let alone, fail. It is a ridiculous notion that we as parents can prevent all heartache from our children by never letting them feel lik...

Blog #25 flying high

November 14, 2014

This afternoon we went downtown to The New York Flying Trapeze School in Chicago. Flying trapeze is an activity that combines athleticism, art, and adrenaline. It also takes a certain personality to climb 64 feet into the air, trust the spotter at the top to hold you as you stand like the Leaning Tower of Piza over a 3x2 platform above the ground to grab a swinging bar, and jump at the words “hup,” that sends you soaring into the air. Well, two of us ...

Blog #24 fiber and fabric show

November 10, 2014

We ventured to the Chicago Botanic Gardens for their annual Fiber and Fabric Art show.  This was a huge show displaying many artisans works from quilts to clothes, to baskets and masks. The colors and textures are so inviting to the senses, they call you to look at them deeper, and pull you to touch them. I am always amazed by what people can do with needles and yarn. I can’t even sew in a straight line! Arianna did want to make matching ap...

Blog #23  drum circle rocked our world

November 10, 2014

This weekend I was part of a Funfair with Circus and Arts event. The event was open to the public, and including acrobatics, german wheel, juggling, unicycles, art, woodworking, GyroKinesis and African Drums. It was a busy night in the gym, but my little tribe kept flocking back to the drum circle. The drum leader was an amazing woman, who lives half the year in the USA, and half the year in New Guinea. She lives the music. She lives for...

Blog #22 bees have spit

November 8, 2014

A couple weeks back, the kids and I saw a massive beehive hanging from the neighbors tree. It is ginormous. Later that afternoon, as we were driving back into the neighborhood, I notice a piece of that nest had fallen to the the ground. I pulled the car over and Arianna went and picked it up for our collection of nature related stuff. We looked at the many layers of thin nest, marveled at the holes and mazes in the chunk we found, and wondered how the r...

Blog #21 NaNoWriMo

November 7, 2014

NaNoWriMo is the acronym for National Novel Writing Month. My kids took informational kick-off class this week sponsored by our wonderful librarians, both whom are very excited about kids writing. One is the children's librarian, who is encouraging beyond measure, adors helping kids, and offered to help with their works of art anytime. The other is a hip, in-the-know teen librarian that is enthused by all young adult literature, comic strips, movies, animati...

Blog #20 oh the places we go

November 4, 2014

“Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won……” This week my kids decided they wanted to sign up for the National Geography Bee for homeschoolers in our county. They posed a question to me, “hey Mom, if we sign up for this, can it count as our geography class?” This struck me as funny seeing as we aren’t really doing classes per se. Then I realized that they were traditi...

Blog #19  Happy Halloween stories

November 1, 2014

Halloween night in our town means some combination of the following: cold, hot, rain, sleet, snow, howling winds or eerie stillness. It is always dark by 5:30. So, off we went this year

(the combination: cold, gushing winds with a sprinkle of snow flurries) Trick or Treating. I walk with the kids, not because they need me. And not because I fear kidnappings on Halloween, but because my neighborhood has a way of adults bonding in the streets as...

Blog #18 living and learning

October 27, 2014

Yesterday was an absolutely gorgeous autumn day in Chicagoland. The jeans and sweatshirt temperature, the vibrant colors in every direction, the warm sun. I opened the door and let the kids run free. They raked leaves, played with the dog in  leaf piles, explored the woods, created backyard games. Found stuff. I don’t know what because I was putting away garden statues and flower pots. It was splendid. In the way of school we did nothing, but i...

Blog #17  five star reviews

October 24, 2014

Matthew holds few interests in life. At the age of 12.5 he enjoys martial arts, video games, YouTube sensations, friends, filmmaking, watching football, making weapons out of sticks, and eating. He is awed by powerful people, good or bad, and their influences on the masses. He is into good vs. evil. He would love to create a YouTube channel that can speak out to the greater world. Not a lot to draw from when you want to encourage a new educational...

Blog #16 Deutsch lehren

October 21, 2014

Arianna wants to learn many languages, but she picked German first.  I speak one (unless you count the little phrases I still remember from high school Spanish class). You know the language class where you memorize a bunch of vocabulary words, but never actually speak conversationally. That is my background. How am I suppose to teach her this? She did not wait for me to figure out the answer. She decided to check out a book from the library Beginners Ger...

October 14, 2014

Today I learned just how important it is for young learners to have the time and freedom to go deeper into information in which they have been introduced. Our day started with Matthew and Arianna writing with quills and ink. They loved it. We had picked this lovely set of parchment with the Gettysburg address written on it in Abes hand, the ink, and the feather quill on our trip to Springfield this past weekend. Arianna sat in front of me in dressed as Laura Ingalls Wilder fr...

October 13, 2014

Well today was interesting. Columbus day. I started the day reading the kids and article about Seattle banning the celebration of Columbus to honor Indigenous people. Yes, they have dumped Columbus Day to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day instead. They are amongst several cities around the USA, and the entire state of South Dakota has never honored the day denoted as Columbus Day. The kids were quite fascinated by this article, and the accusations thrown out about the man they...

October 12, 2014

We took a family field trip this weekend to Springfield, IL. The home of Abraham Lincoln. My kids think they hate history. What they really hate is filling in blanks, and memorizing names to match with dates about events they don’t understand. So it was a trick on my part to teach history differently. It worked!  The kids LOVED every minute of learning this way, and so did the parents. We went to Lincoln’s house--the only national park in all of Illinois. We watched a sho...

October 9, 2014

I had an informal meeting today with a friend, who brought her son along. The boys asked if they could use their bebe guns to shoot at targets. We agreed, and off they went. As we talked and occasionally peeked out the window, we realized how happy they seemed. They were setting up elaborate targets with boxes and cans and paper circles. The planning that went into the intended bulls-eye platforms was truly a work of art. Annie Oakley would be so proud. We watched as they disc...

October 7, 2014

Yesterday my daughter turned 11 years old. She asked for a walking globe to perfect her circus arts training. She also wanted a venus fly trap plant and her ears pierced. She is getting so big, but she requested something else for her special day: to play a game with “the whole family.” She wanted to play a board game with us. She let her brother help pick a game from our abundance choices in the game closet. They came back with Harry Potter Clue. None of us had played thi...

October 5, 2014

Final show of Dr. Dolittle happened this afternoon, fifth performance. We spent almost everyday of our last month at this theater. The John Lumber Center for the Performing arts at the College of Lake County are home away from home. It became an incredible adventure for Arianna. As I reflect on her journey from auditioning to showtime, I am in awe of how much learning happened just by being a part of life. For one, Arianna read the book Dr. Dolittle, a known classic that would...

September 27, 2014

My Arianna was cast in Dr. Dolittle at our local community college. She auditioned, she got a call back. She got disappointed with a duel part casting as a little monkey and a circus ball walker (yes she can walk on a ball), but no speaking lines. So, she went the first week a bit sad, and I was sad for her. As the days ticked along, and the rehearsals became longer I thought she would start complaining about the amount of time she was giving to this production. I watched a...

September 16, 2014

Two weeks into this schooling without school project, and WOW the change is our home is Amazing. My kids opened their own cake business. They are making gluten free and dairy free cakes from scratch. They have made an excellent flourless chocolate cake, perfected carrot cake muffins, and are designing a chocolate cream filled cake. They have bought their own ingredients, they have done the math to calculate the cost of each ingredient. They have researched why organic ingre...

September 3, 2014

The day after Labor Day is a good start school day according to my husband. The dilemma I have is not the start date. It is the approach. I just realized that we are two different pages of the homeschool book. Yes, we did buy a bunch of books for the kids this year. Yes, I did show them these books, explain the books, make them binders. Yes, even I am having trouble of completely letting go of all I know about school--textbooks, review questions, math, spelling and grammar. ...

August 23, 2014

It’s 8:30 am, raining hard, the sky is grey and dreary outside, and we are all asleep. It also happens to be the first day of public school in this town. We slept through the dragging of kids out of bed. We slept through the rush of getting dressed in new school clothes. We slept through the hurried half eaten breakfast, the missing shoe, the craziness of racing to the bus stop. As the kids woke up to their own rhythm, and meandered downstairs, we ate a healthy, happy breakf...

August 12, 2014

School Registration Day.  The day kids wait for in August to find out who their teacher will be this school year.  The day they call all their friends to see who is sharing this classroom experience with them for the next nine months. The non-stop phone ringing (or texting) that is fun and exciting or disappointing depending on weather your BFF is in your class.

Well our phone is not buzzing. Our house is quietly subdue. The kids are feeling left out of this summer right of pa...

At the end of the school year, obnoxious amount of stuff come home. The lockers are emptied, the desks are cleaned, supplies are collected and schoolwork is shoved into bags to be brought home. The stacks of notebooks, graded worksheet and journals, that come in fill the entire counter space and tabletops. I sift through it all.  Amongst that stuff this year I found two things written by my son. One was a letter in his creative writing journal, the other was his final exit poem from his 5th-6...

So world I am homeschooling my kids this year. Take that in. REACT. 

You are crazy. That is a lot of work. Why? I could never do that. Are you sure? Maybe you’ll change your mind. Aren’t you worried about socialization? My husband thinks that is a bad idea. 

How do you know you can do it? What makes you qualified to teach? I wish I could do that. 

Why are you pulling them both out? I wish we had better schools. You should talk to the school. You can do it because you are a hippie. You are br...