I’m Heather, mom and love to knit, cook, read and garden. My husband, Monty, is a game designer who…loves to play and design games. Austin (10) is an avid gamer whose favorite games are Little Big Planet, Assassin’s Creed and Minecraft. He loves to design his own levels and make mods for the games that allow it, building Legos, Marvel Comics and our mini zoo consisting of a dog, a cat, a Russian tortioise and a bearded Dragon.
We are a newly unschooling family and live in Austin, Texas. We started our journey while temporarily living in San Francisco in 2010. I saw a listing for the HSC conference in Sacramento posted on the local homeschool board, and on a whim that weekend we packed up and drove from San Francisco to Sacramento in hopes of finding an easier way to homeschool. Maybe some magic curriculum.
I walked into a session that Pam Sooroshian was giving about unschooling. She asked everyone to write down three things children need to be taught. I wrote down math, reading, writing. The other people in the room were saying radical things like “nothing”! I raised my hand and asked, “How do you deal with the anxiety of not teaching?” Pam told me to read Frank Smith and Sandra Dodd (who happened to be sitting right next to me).
Sandra was speaking later that afternoon so I went to check her out. I left Sandra’s talk on "partnerships in the family" a changed woman. I bought her book and could feel old reasonings about bedtime, math, reading and eating breaking in my head and my heart. My husband wasn’t as sold as I was walking out of that conference room, so we traded reading material; I would read World War Z If he read The Big Book of Unschooling. And that is how we came to be an unschooling family.
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