A Potluck Life

Tag: play

  • Homeschooling on a shoestring

    Recently I heard a parent casually remark that in her experience, homeschooling one child costs about eight grand a year. That certainly hasn’t been my experience. During the first ten years of my kids’ lives, the amount we spent was negligible. As teens the kids had interests they wanted to pursue but we still curbed…

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  • Talking about ‘The Gift of Time’ with Pam Laricchia

    Recently I had the pleasure of chatting with Pam Laricchia on her Living Joyfully With Unschooling podcast. Pam is a longtime unschooler who’s written a few excellent books on the topic herself. As you can guess from the title of the podcast episode, we talked about time as a major benefit of unschooling, along with…

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  • Jane Goodall, the unschooled scientist

    “Jane,” The new documentary about Jane Goodall, is a beautiful film. The making of the movie was catalyzed by hours of gorgeous, compelling footage heretofore buried in the archives of National Geographic. In it, we see Goodall exploring the wilds of Gombe with instincts as razor sharp as those of a child allowed to roam…

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  • I homeschooled my kids and recess was our curriculum

    The other day I heard about a bill to mandate recess in my state. The proposed law would require elementary school students to have at least 20 minutes a day of  “supervised, safe and unstructured free-play recess.” 20 minutes? That floored me. Elementary school kids are approximately 6-11 years old. When my kids were that age, their…

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  • What homeschooling gets right about socialization

    As a mom who homeschooled four children to adulthood, I’m accustomed to naysayers who focus on socialization. Sadly, it’s been decades and the ridiculousness just keeps coming. This week in particular, I read more than one article on the subject, so I decided to make a listicle on some of the tools and techniques that…

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  • Put the ‘home’ back in ‘homeschooling’

    Recently I read an advice piece for homeschoolers. Sign your child up to attend a learning center or free school for a few days a week, it said, so as to provide a “home base” for your child’s homeschooling experience. I admit I was taken aback. For me and most of the homeschooling families I…

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  • I couldn’t wait to send my kids to school, but when I did…

    I first heard of homeschooling in a creative writing class.  I was in my twenties and struck up a friendship with the other young mother in the group. When she said she didn’t send her kid to school, my reaction was full of the incredulity I regularly encountered later, once I jumped on the homeschooling…

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  • Dylan, literature, Moby-Dick, and homeschooling

    Bob Dylan finally got around to delivering his Nobel Lecture. No surprise, it focused on literature. Why the wait? It took him some time, he said, to reflect on how his songs relate to literature. He ended by cautioning that songs are fundamentally different than literature, “meant to be sung, not read,” like the words in…

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  • Kids and theater, as they like it

    I remember the afternoon my youngest child, Abby, told me she wanted to put on a production of Hamlet. We were in the kitchen on a beautiful spring day, and Abby, who was 13 at the time, said, “I think I’m going to do Hamlet in the backyard this summer.” The declaration seemed to come…

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  • Unschooling: All you need is love

    This week I attended a screening of Clara Bellar’s film Being and Becoming. The movie portrays the filmmaker’s process of learning about unschooling in order to determine whether to choose it for her own family. It’s a personal journey that takes us to the United States, France, England, and Germany. One of the movie’s strengths is…

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