Category: Family life
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A New School Year
First we drove Erin to Spokane. She flew out of the airport there with two giant suitcases (weighing 49.5 and 50.0 lbs respectively), her heavy messenger bag (carrying all the stuff that she unpacked from her suitcases to get them down to the 50-lb limit) and her violin. She flew into Boston to spend a few days […]
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Licensed!
Sophie did it, she powered through the “L” (learner’s) phase of getting a driver’s license, and got to the “N” (new driver) stage. As I wrote a year and a half ago, things are not exactly set up well, nor is motivation terribly high, for my kids to become licensed drivers. Neither Noah nor Erin have […]
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Hughes Reunion
We rented an island. We were looking for a cottage that slept at least 14 comfortably, somewhere within half a day’s drive of both Toronto and Ottawa. And the island was what we found. Actually, my mom rented it, as a gift to all of us. I had hoped “all of us” would include not […]
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SVI 2016
SVI has come and gone for another year. Registration filled extremely early this year (third week of March) and that allowed me to get a jump on the scheduling. We had most of the basics fleshed out by mid-April, which took some of the pressure off me in May-June, when things normally get fairly frantic […]
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Distributed learning: the exit
Fiona took some online Grade 10 courses this semester: PE and Personal & Career Planning. She took them partly because she wanted these required credits out of the way so that she can focus next year on the academic courses that she’s excited to dive into. But we also figured they would be a good introduction […]
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Conventional wisdom and unschooled teens
All four of my children grew up unschooling through their primary-school-aged years. Their learning was wide open, uncoerced, simultaneously lagging in some areas and massively precocious in others. It was typically highly efficient, mastery-oriented and interest-led. And then they all chose to attend school starting sometime between age 12 and 14. In some cases, at times, they attended part time. But […]
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Distributed Learning: The Final Episode
We are now nearing the end of what will be our last year of home-based learning. And the last part of the ride has been a bit bumpy. We started the year with Fiona (12 at the time, and officially “in Grade 9”) enrolled with SelfDesign, a DL program we’d had some experience with but hadn’t been part […]
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Dance showcase
Four performances, four or five numbers each time. It was a crazy weekend, but she emerged motivated to add even more dance next year, to immerse herself further in life at the studio, in training her body, in learning more technique, in broadening her skills.
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Brahms Concerto
Fiona and I made a whirlwind trip to Vancouver. For me it was the second in as many weekends. Erin had pulled up her roots in Montreal, and was making a stop in the Vancouver area before heading home to the Kootenays. She had a date to perform the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Richmond Symphony. […]
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Accomplishments
Over the past few years the focus of my blog (well, it’s arguable whether it has any focus at all) has moved away from the specifics of what my children are up to. That’s been the natural result of them growing up and becoming their own people, and my feeling that I want to honour […]
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Circus
Both Fiona and Sophie are doing aerial silks at the new circus arts school in Nelson. They’re in different classes and I haven’t had a chance to see Sophie in action yet. She’s been at it for just over three months; the instructor moved her up from beginner to Level 1 after the first session and she’s […]
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Getting ready for school
We’ve started the paperwork, the “Request for Transfer” into the bricks-and-mortar high school that Fiona wants to attend next year. Actually, she has started the paperwork; for whatever reason this kid loves filling out forms and isn’t afraid of a pen, so she has done it herself. Really, though, this whole year has really been about getting […]
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Changing DL programs
Again. For several years our family had been with the SelfDesign distributed learning (DL) program, an unschooling-friendly sort of virtual umbrella school to which we reported in various creative ways on a weekly basis in exchange for support primarily in the form of a resource allowance. Then the local school, a place full of humanity […]
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On being twelve
This isn’t about my own, current, 12-year-old, or about any of my former 12-year-olds. Maybe it’s a bit about the 12-year-old I used to be, and about who that has made me as a parent. It’s a copy and paste from a message board, where I was responding to a mom whose daughter had stolen […]
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Permission to Christmas
I give up. Now that Voices West is over, now that the first snow has fallen, now that Fiona is into the thick of preparing for holiday performances, now that plane tickets are booked for the grown-up kids to get home, go ahead and start your Christmassing, girls. Put up a little tree and ornaments […]