It's June!  The nights are warmer.  Maybe you are camping or at least sitting around your little backyard fire pit toasting marshmallows.  Or maybe you are lying out on a blanket in the yard in the evening, slathered with something citronella-ish, counting bats and waiting for the stars to come out.  Or maybe you are driving a whole day to get to a family reunion or vacation and you need some ammunition to while away the car time.  Enter fairy tales, folktales and tall tales! *What I am posting are things we've read or done over the years.  There's no way you could cram this into one month!  This is just a list to inspire you. Fairy Tale Read Alouds: As I recall, the very first story is rather gruesome, but the following ones are better. Andrew Lang books - though I do think we only own the Blue Fairy book, we got others out of the library on occasion. Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales Grimm's Brothers fairy tales Perra...

When I was exploring unschooling, the idea of self-regulation was big.  Is it still a big concept in unschooling circles?  I don't know, but it was then, at least.  So people didn't have bedtimes for their kids or they wouldn't restrict sugary items or they didn't have any restrictions on video game playing, etc.  And parents would brag, basically, about how their kids stayed up all night playing video games and slept all day and that this didn't bother them because they believed the child would at some point regulate themselves.  It was sort of their badge of being really radical unschoolers.  This just struck as so weird. These were some of things I'd read about on unschooling boards.  I used to frequent the VegSource Unschooling message board (any old timers remember that?) and I think other places, but anyway, I will just go through and tackle some of the areas where self-regulation was touted and why I just wasn't convinced, namely bedtimes and vi...

On the facebook group, someone wanted to know what our routine was at different stages of age groups.  So I thought I'd revisit my other blog* from the year 2010 and see what was going on.  And I honestly chuckled because I'm basically saying the same things over and over again about how we unschooled or relaxed schooled or whatever you want to call it. Here's one called:  Why We Do Some Things Formally I used to (very sporadically) try to record Unschooling Moments of the Week .  This was back when my  youngest, now almost 18 years old, was nine.  Here's another record of some unschooly and schooly stuff going on at the time. Here's an example of me journaling a day.   It was a mix of play, child initiated learning and formal learning.  I highly recommend journaling to get perspective on just how much is going on in the home.  It always helped me put anxiety at bay.  I do think we women have a weakness in that we tend to blow t...

This post is about certain elements of 'unschooling' that I wrestled with.  A Catholic worldview doesn't really mesh with a secular one in terms of child rearing. The problem of authority and limitations in unschooling .  As a Catholic I think I have a God-given authority over my children.  My authority isn't there just to insure that my kids are safe (which I often thought unschoolers limited their parental authority to - keeping kids somewhat safe), though that is certainly part of it, but it is there so that I can nurture and raise children to be potentially the very best individuals they can be, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.  In the truest sense, raising a child as a Catholic is holistic! One problem I have with radical or secular unschoolers (and I should probably define those terms better at some point!) is that while they will often concede the need to keep children safe, other premises they work from don't seem to include the other e...

Update:   I'm trying to get my act together here.  I plan to publish some Montessori posts, to continue a series that I started with a Part 1 but never followed up with a Part 2.  These are in the works!  I plan for them to be my summer project.  In the meantime I plan to import here some of my unschooling posts from my other blog, Household Diary.  I'll also post monthly Rabbit Trail themes, hopefully the day before the first day of each month. In the meantime, here are some things that really helped me with prayer. I blush to post this because I don't feel very 'evolved' (as people tend to say nowadays) in my prayer life.  I admit, regular, steady prayer has always been hard for me.  I think other moms (probably you!) are better at this than I am.  One reason why I liked being in a Catholic co-op or groups is that the activities often included prayer time and liturgical year themes.  For instance for many years our local Catholic h...

One very simple item to have around the house that makes it much easier to impart knowledge to your children is a whiteboard.  Or it could be a chalkboard.  In our early years when we lived in our old house, my husband painted chalkboard paint on the back of our kitchen door (that led outside).  This door was ugly as heck anyway.  It was the type that old louvered blinds in the middle of it, that the previous owners had put particle board over, I guess because it wasn't well insulated and let in a lot of cold air.  It was so ugly!  So we painted over it.  But as I started to homeschool I somehow got the bright idea to paint it in chalkboard paint.  This was so handy because we sat around our kitchen table a lot chatting.  We also had an old, old TV sitting in the corner and my kids would watch Sesame St. and Reading Rainbow and Barney there often.  My kids liked drawing on that painted chalkboard and I would write things up on that board...