Category: Learning Lifestyle

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Rainbows at Winterthur, Moon Shine at Delaware Museum of Natural History

It was a slightly desperate move. The forecast of thunderstorms should have kept us away from outdoor adventures, but I was feeling called to opt outside. For nearly three hours we had the grounds of Winterthur Garden at our disposal. Most of that time was spent running in, out, and around the Ottoman Tent as thunder, rain, and sunshine poured from the sky.

I don’t know how many rainbows we spotted, but the highlights included a double rainbow, a complete rainbow, and a miraculous rainbow that appeared on the near side of the trees.

The storms never got close enough to make us very nervous and we laid ourselves in the grass between downpours.

We snacked on mango and spied snakes, chipmunks, catbirds, toads, frogs, fish, redwing blackbirds, a dragonfly, and a green heron.

More than a small part of me wanted to stay for sunset (we joked about camping out in the Tent), but we had pressed our luck with the weather and more adventure awaited across the street at Delaware Museum of Natural History.

The varying clouds kept stargazing off the calendar, but we learned about the moon and our night sky at discovery stations and during live presentations in the auditorium and STARLAB inflatable planetarium.

We wrapped up the evening with fascinating minerals and legitimately scary foliage in the special Wicked Plants exhibition.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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An Unlikely, Art-Filled Life

These pictures were taken three years apart and neither one by me.

Delaware Art Museum, 2016. Reprinted for the DE Creative Kids Passport, 2019.
Peninsula Gallery, 2019

Unschooling has been the most rewarding journey of my life. I still don’t like the word “unschool” and didn’t know it when I started exposing my sons to art before the youngest could walk. I had no history or education with art, I was sent by my wife as she knew there was no way I would be a “stay-at-home” dad. Story times and family-friendly tours and activities got us into museums on a regular basis and I quickly saw the magic that was happening in my sons’ lives.

Delaware Art Museum, 2016
Brandywine River Museum of Art, 2012
Biggs Museum of American Art, 2015
Biggs Museum of American Art, 2015
Meeting the Twin Poets at Delaware Contemporary, 2018
Shakespeare at Winterthur Garden, Museum, and Library, 2013
Terrific Tuesday at Winterthur Garden, Museum, and Library, 2014

An intentional learning lifestyle has taken us back again and again to our favorite galleries, where there is always something new to discover.

As we return to all these places in 2019 to complete our DE Creative Kids Passport, I will try not to be overwhelmed by the memories that we have made.

God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason

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Living Dream

It’s hard to communicate how significant Shakespeare has been in my life since before I met Mary and through to our life without her.

Mary and I saw Patrick Stewart as Macbeth in London during our honeymoon nearly 12 years ago. It was Mary’s first exposure to the Bard on stage and it was pure luck when we stumbled upon the chance to see one of my favorite actors in an amazing role.

A couple years later we would take our new baby to see Twelfth Night under the stars as performed by Delaware Shakespeare at Rockwood Park in Wilmington, Delaware.

Passing on my passion for reading and writing has been one of the few things I’ve really desired for my children. I read 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea to my first born in his first months and never stopped introducing some of our oldest stories at ridiculously early stages.

Neither of us came from theater backgrounds and would not have predicted how our boys would take to the stage.

They’re in two productions of Shakespeare’s plays this summer. Their partnering up to play the comedy team of Dogberry and Verges in a homeschool production of Much Ado About Nothing is very special and the result of a lot of dedicated work.

However, their involvement in Delaware Shakespeare’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor touches me in a way that stretches back to the chance to reintroduce Mary to the Bard and share my love. To imagine them on the same stage where Mary and I had one of our last date nights…it helps the world make a little more sense.

They won’t have any lines, but today they had their first rehearsal and my heart swelled as they took on the choreography like pros. I see them building their own lives and it is an immense blessing to watch their journeys.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Patience and Voluntarism

I’m proud of my son for getting back on the mats at Elevated Studios this week. He’s been mentally wrestling with attending class. I’ve tried to have patience and remember that if I force him to do a thing, that he’ll eventually hate the thing, me, or himself. I’ve asked him questions and attempted to find a way to help him train again. I can’t say anything I did or said got him there. He’s always some mystery to me.

For all that I don’t know, I am confident that letting him make these decisions is the right path in allowing him to develop as an independent individual.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Under Cover History

We’re not the kind of unschool family who doesn’t have any rules about bed time. I try to get my sons in bed at a reasonable hour whether we are home or on the road. That said, if they wish to quietly read, I will usually fall asleep before they do. One of my greatest joys is to get up in the night and see them passed out in their books with the lights still on.

Books are everywhere in our lives. It’s not just a messy obsession, it’s my intention to surround them with the resources they crave when curiosity strikes. When I straightened the sheets at the end of my younger son’s bed, I had to capture what I found.

The graphic novel editions of Moby Dick and Treasure Island are key tools in how I introduce my children to classic literature. When language is challenging, they have these images to help them through difficult vocabulary. Skyscrapers is from when I was curious about a college course that didn’t fit into the “plan” I was supposed to be following. Another failure on the part of institutionalized education that brought me to the learning lifestyle. The essential oils guide is our latest acquisition as we explore plant-based holistic health and apply our curiosity in a most valuable way. Paddington connects me to my youth visiting England and embracing those stories as part of my heritage (as well as my English, non-author, great-uncle Michael Bond). The Little Prince is an oddly wonderful library book that both sons are working through. Sniglets has been mine for ages and I don’t know why. The action hero guide has also followed me for years and is a garden for feeding their imaginative play.

These moments remind me why I have this crazy assembly of texts. They remind me of the car repair manuals, Calvin and Hobbes collections, and Joseph Campbell books I dove into as a child looking for the secrets of the adult world. They remind me why I make extra space in our lives for reading and don’t dictate when, what, nor how it is done (although library books at muddy campsites set my teeth gnashing).

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Curate Your Community

We are surrounded by impressive people who bring brilliance, strength, fun, compassion, beauty, bravery, passion, challenge, faith, joy, and love into our world. We gravitate towards excellence and engage it whenever possible. It’s no accident. After 12 hours of adventure in Philadelphia with home-educating families, Brazilian jiu-jitsu bad-asses, an FBI agent, and a couple librarians, I remembered why we frequently pause our adventures to connect with so many people.

I didn’t know it would lead to a holistic learning lifestyle when I first watched my sons asking museum security about a painting. I didn’t know chatting with a martial arts school at a crowded event about their summer camps would blossom into the most consistent component of our learning environment. I didn’t know small talking with homeschooling and unschooling moms would build a support structure that has buoyed us in hard times and created opportunities we would have otherwise missed.

I’ve learned that opportunity is everywhere and it is almost always locked away in a human who can’t wait to reveal it to you. I’ve learned that human connection is the key. Not just to experiences and knowledge, but to deeper understanding of God and the world around us. “Oneness” doesn’t mean we’re all the same, it means there are threads that join each of us together, one at a time. When we are open enough to see these threads and wrap our hands around them, we find something new in ourselves.

Each individual you meaningfully relate with becomes part of your community. Get into the habit of just chatting with people and soon you will find that you have an amazing world opening up around you.

Have a God blessed day,
Jason

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At the Park: Unschool Style


Even when we’re at the park for fun with friends these little learners won’t stop problem solving.

Beyond resolving conflicts, dealing with playground bullies, and inventing games, some of the boys decided this log needed to return to the river. With teamwork and simple machines they accomplished their goal with no adult guidance.

Surely a minor benchmark, but a fine example of how we look for problems to solve everywhere we go.

Have a God blessed day,

Jason

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My Favorite Home Education Question

“How can my husband help?”

My wife and I hadn’t discussed homeschooling and hadn’t even heard of unschooling nor deschooling when our elder son became eligible for kindergarten. A series of hiccups, annoyances, and coincidences inspired us to look at all the options we could imagine. My mind was set as I thought, “If I can’t teach him a kindergarten material, I’m a worthless dad.” We committed to a (school) year of homeschooling with the goal of honestly reevaluating at the end of it. We didn’t have a clear philosophy nor curriculum and were questioning ourselves within a month. The reevaluations came on a regular basis, never scheduled, but imposed by our failures. We talked through all the mistakes and started to see that we could work through minor adversities to discover major rewards. We didn’t stop at the end of that school year, we had established rhythms of learning and saw no reason to disrupt them. The evaluations continued, as did the failures, but our eyes lifted from the day-to-day struggles and gazed out to see what our goals were. It would be two more summers before my boys knew what “summer vacation” meant.

Our sons had shown an inherently strong capacity for learning, that part was relatively easy. What we wanted to model was thoughtfulness, confidence, kindness, and a capacity to love and help others. Although a useful shortcut for the uninitiated, we dropped the term “homeschool” in our personal discussions as we were not creating our version of school, we were practicing a learning lifestyle. Our faith community became a huge part of our mission. Not only could we bring cans of soup on Sunday, but we could hop on the trucks on Monday morning and go visit the people and places that benefited from the donations. We could spend a quiet Friday cleaning up a local park or setting up tables for the church rummage sale. Opportunity was to be had any day of the week.

We continue to find chances to help and broaden our ability to do so. We’ve learned immeasurable lessons along the way and achieved some good along the path.

God bless,
Jason

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I Come to Unschool Caesar, Not to Praise Him

Okay, not entirely. My sons have actually begun a class with the goal of putting on a production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Pages Alive Theater brings classic literature to students and guides them to bring the stories to life on stage for local audiences.

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. 

I bring the unschool factor, sometimes inappropriately, and recently discovered Wisecrack‘s Thug Notes. NSFW, nor children, but it is hilarious and quickly hits the main points of the plot. Please review this before sharing it, as it represents the most base of my educational techniques.

My sons are excited about stop motion Lego films, we dug into those next.

Graphic novels are always a good starting point for us and the director recommended Julius Caesar (No Fear Shakespeare) for exploring more difficult language.

If I can’t find the play currently on stage (this type of prep work is usually done in anticipation of a live production), I’ll look around for a solid film production. Marlon Brando’s Caesar has been recommended to me and I think we’ll give it a shot.

If you are looking for a way to engage your children in classic literature, try one or more of these methods. They can also be a great way for adults to catch up on the beautiful material that their own schooling had no idea how to present. My sons maximize their recall when they compare different versions of a story, and the different choices made by authors, illustrators, directors, actors, and costume designers will lead to fascinating discussions.

The deepest way to investigate a text is to act it out. This is most true for children who are dying (quite literally in Shakespeare) to play in the adult world. With no stage experience myself, I am eternally grateful for organizations like Pages Alive Theater for providing this type of enrichment.

God bless,
Jason

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Take Your Children to See Shakespeare

Macbeth, Pericles, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and various Shakespeare readings: my sons have seen or participated in all of these plays, most of them before losing their mother.

Experiencing Shakespeare in person places a wide range of human emotion on display: joy, passion, betrayal, murder, love, humor, wonder, deception, innocence, ignorance, jealousy, and loss. I am convinced that this controlled introduction to intense emotion provided my children with the tools they needed to navigate the equally broad spectrum of feelings that we have experienced this year.

God bless,
Jason