I particularly enjoyed the author’s about me blurb.  She writes,  Amida is the mom of three darn kids. She used to stress about state standards and test scores but has since come to her senses and enjoys blogging about their journey into unschooling.

Visit Amida at Journey into Unschooling

HearthSong – Toys You’ll Feel Good About Giving

Barbara Kane founded HearthSong in 1983 because of a growing conviction that, “..too often, in our culture, children are pushed to grow up too fast. I started HearthSong to make a statement reinforcing what parents themselves know is true, right and healthy–that childhood is a very special time.” Children need time to be children.

A catalyst for Kane was a major national news magazine’s cover story on “superbabies.” This article, and her own observations, made her more aware of how our society pressures parents to teach their children more and more facts, at earlier and earlier ages. In Kane’s view, “Earlier is not necessarily better. It’s important that children learn basic skills, but at the right developmental age. Most of all, children need time for creative, imaginative play. In fact, it is through play that children learn most readily.”

Kane chose the company’s name to reflect her values: the hearth, a traditional symbol for the center of the home, and song to symbolize the family spirit, the joy that parents and children can experience together.

Kane felt strongly that childhood is a unique period in the life of an individual, that the consciousness of a child is completely different from that of an adult, that there is a specific purpose and a specific pattern to childhood and to the development of a child’s consciousness, and that adults can help or hinder the accomplishment of that purpose and pattern.

With a love for children, a reverence for life, and a desire to support you in your task of parenting, we offer you our service and our products: toys you’ll feel good about giving.

Free full color catalog upon request.

The Unschooling Unmanual, Edited by Jan Hunt and Jason Hunt, The Natural Child
ISBN 978-0-9685754-5-1

Unschoolers seeking inspiration and affirmation will enjoy the Hunts’ new unmanual, which contains more quotable quotes per square inch than any recent homeschooling book. Dedicated to John Holt, the book begins with an epigraph from his writing, including this phrase: “For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning.” With this theme, the editors of The Unschooling Unmanual have selected eleven thoughtful essays as well as excerpts from unschooler Mary Van Doren’s memoirs, to illuminate the unschooling life. The essays include poignant scenes of unschooling working in families’ lives, blended with philosophical underpinnings.

Rue Kream’s opening essay addresses doubt new and prospective unschoolers may feel. She asks, “Can we step off the well-worn path and find our way?” She answers with a joyful expansion of her assertion, “Children belong with their families.” Her conclusion, that her family chooses to unschool because “we want our children to be truly free,” introduces the idea of freedom, the first of several dominant sub-themes in the book.

Nanda Van Gestel’s multi-part essay develops the freedom theme, since Van Gestel first considered taking her child out of school while living in the Netherlands when school attendance was mandatory. A move to the United States allowed them to homeschool, and she and her husband were amazed by the change in their son, who “finally had the freedom to be himself.”

Like other contributors, Van Gestel is quotable throughout, but I actually caught my breath when I read about her own school art classes. “We didn’t draw horses, so I drew them in secret during other lessons.” She conveys not a bias against art classes, which she supports when a child is “ready and interested,” but the power of unschooling, which means not having to draw horses “in secret.”

Daniel Quinn, best known for his book Ishmael, contributes a powerful Gatto-esque essay exploring the fallacies of compulsory schooling and supporting the idea that children will indeed learn what they need to know.

Expanding the book’s freedom emphasis, Jan Hunt herself also strongly develops another of the book’s sub-themes, trust, in her well-wrought essays. An excerpt from Holt’s Learning All the Time and Kim Houssenloge’s reassuring exploration “Why I Chose Unschooling” provide further insight about trusting children to learn, as Houssenloge says, “how to interact with the world safely and confidently and with room to grow and change in a natural way.”

Earl Stevens answers the inevitable question, “What is Unschooling?” He tells us, “Unschooling isn’t a recipe, and therefore it can’t be explained in recipe terms. It is impossible to give unschooling directions for people to follow so that it can be tried for a week or so to see if it works. Unschooling isn’t a method, it is a way of looking at children and at life.” Stevens’ explanation of unschooling as “natural learning, experience-based learning, or independent learning,” will be valuable for anyone grappling with the question of “what do we do if we don’t do school?”

First-person stories and straight-forward language make The Unschooling Unmanual readable and reassuring. One caveat is that the book, clearly an unmanual with trust-the-children focus, does not attempt to have the scope to address whether interventions, therapies, or special practices are ever needed and beneficial for a certain child or whether/how the editors feel they might fit an unschooling context.

My final caveat turns out not to be one. I initially felt disappointed in Kream’s essay, “What About College?” I agree with her statement, “Our goal is that there will not be a particular moment when our children must suddenly be pushed from the nest,” and I live it, since among my brood are older teens. However, after many years of home/unschooling, I realized I still wanted a “how to” in terms of college or assisting my sons with their development as young adults. In an immediate second thought, I realized I was seeking instructions that don’t exist in life, much less in an unmanual. If you want a formula for preparing unschooled kids for college, you won’t find it in The Unschooling Unmanual. But you will find unbridled support for unschooling, which, as Kream says, “gives each child the time and the room to follow her own path and to travel that path with the loving support and companionship of her family.”

To read an excerpt and to order the book, please visit http://www.naturalchild.org/unmanual/.

There is still time to share another great resource with you. Iditarod , a blog by Northern Light Media is following the race closely offering some great insight, photos and even video. Enjoy!

My pans were reasonably priced (bought the Lodge Pro Logic), heat pretty evenly. I don’t have to worry if the kids use a metal turning utensil when cooking. I also found the pans were also very reasonably priced when compared to the Teflon pans, which I inevitably had to chuck out after a few months of use once the Teflon started flaking – and yes, I’ve been through both generic and expensive name brands.

I also found that after my pans were well seasoned the kids have had much more enjoyment and success with cooking. My pans were pre-seasoned but I seasoned them further by putting a bit of light olive oil on the cooking surface and heating them till they were very hot in the oven (you really want to have you some nice mitts to pick the pans up with) AND we use a butter flavored spray before each use, after the pan is hot, just before they add their eggs or pancakes)

One of their favorite cast iron pans is a 10′ Griddle Pan, frequently used for cooking pancakes. The side isn’t too high that it burns their wrist and as long as they don’t put too much in it at a time, it’s pretty easy and even my almost 8 year old can successfully make her own eggs (or pancakes) without much interference from me or her older sisters.
They all enjoy the independence of choosing what they want to cook, when they want to cook it, and the all around satisfaction and enjoyment of eating the end product.

Cast iron pans are a lot heavier so I take charge of scrubbing them out as they aren’t something you’d want to throw in the dishwasher. I clean mine using a good stiff plastic bristle brush and water, while the pan is piping hot so that the water evaporates immediately and doesn’t rust. But I have heard of people that use another method with coarse salt.

For more information, I added some links to visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_iron_cookware
http://whatscookingamerica.net/Information/HotFire.htm
http://whatscookingamerica.net/Information/CastIronPans.htm
http://huntsville.about.com/od/food/qt/cleancastiron.htm

Posted by Tracy

Our newest booklet, The Unschooling Unmanual, by Nanda Van Gestel, Rue
Kream, Mary Van Doren and Jan Hunt, will be published this fall.

Through engaging personal stories, examples, and essays, the writers
offer inspiration and encouragement for experienced and prospective
unschoolers alike.

Read an excerpt by clicking here.

The booklet can be pre-ordered at a discounted price here.

I’ve started a new blog and a website about my work and interests in
education. I’ll be posting materials from my homeschooling seminars and
other educational work every week, so be sure to tell your friends, email
lists, and other interested parties to check out

http://www.patfarenga.com

for unconventional ideas about teaching and learning. Right now on the site
you’ll find:

• Information about getting started with homeschooling
• Government and other research data about homeschooling
• An eclectic, growing collection of resources for learning outside of school
• Articles, reviews, and opinion sure to challenge and, I hope, amuse you as well.