ESTHER JONES

One of the most common questions I get about unschooling is how will the children learn maths. It's funny how nervous maths makes us. There seems to be a collective anxiety around the subject. Certainly it was the one thing guaranteed to make me wobble when we took the children out of school. My insecurities led to me acquiring quite a collection of exercise books designed to make maths fun, and which have sat untouched on the bookshelf for a long time. For a while, right at

I read something recently about how easily and unwittingly we adults turn a learning experience into a teaching experience. A particular scenario from our home came to my mind and the penny finally dropped. Here's what happens. One of the children comes into the room with a question, usually directed at whichever of us they think likely to have the most accurate answer. The question could be anything from 'When were Georgian times?' to 'What's a pyramid scheme?' to "How much

Our journey to unschooling has taken a few years, and finally arrived at its inevitable destination some months ago. I look back now at all the time spent trying to fit the children and ourselves into a structure that never felt right to me, and into which none of us really seemed able to fit, and I'm deeply relieved to have found this place. It isn't always an easy place, but to me it is authentic and coherent. The difficult things that arise aren't about conforming to other