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UNSCHOOLING Well, we've started our "unschooling" here at the Farm with our three children, ages 4, 5 & 6. We've been playing, dancing, making music, cooking, cleaning, making crafts, playing in the snow, reading wonderful books, and generally having a great time. Here are some of the resources we have found useful on our journey so far... LIVING VALUES EDUCATION The purpose of Living Values: Educational Program is to provide guiding principles and tools for the development of the whole person, recognizing that the individual is comprised of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. LIFE LEARNING MAGAZINE Let Life Learning help you discover how to employ self-directed, life-based learning in your own life and/or that of your child. Read all about how other people just like you and your children have learned without being taught...what helps and what hinders, and what they have achieved in their lives as a result. Laugh, cry and identify with parents who are helping themselves and their children learn from the real world...and learning a lot about themselves along the way. Think about how we are limited by a society that believes in coercive education...and how we can transcend those limits in our daily lives. Find support and reassurance for interest-based, learner-directed education and non-coercive parenting. LIVE FREE LEARN FREE MAGAZINE Live Free Learn Free is a magazine for unschoolers and other natural learners. All material is written by those who home educate – both parents and children. It is an inclusive magazine, not only for and by experienced unschoolers, but also for and by those just starting down the path. It embraces those who are radical in their unschooling methods and those who are less so. But mostly, it’s a magazine about children living life. Really living life – unhindered by curriculums, by lunch bells and standardized tests, by schoolyard bullies and tedious homework. It’s about freedom. It’s about families growing closer than they ever dreamed possible. UNSCHOOLING.COM "I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience." -- Anne Sullivan MAGICAL PARENT MAGICAL CHILD This book helps adults rediscover the "playful" and "childlike" genius of their own innate intelligence, as they guide, learn from and mentor children, which awakens and develops in adults new capacities and possibilities. Infusing the adult-child relationship with this fresh creative energy and attention transforms the adult which results in a radically different learning environment for children. Changing the adult changes the environment we call childhood. BRAIN GYM Brain Gym is a program of physical movements that enhance learning and performance in ALL areas. Brain Gym includes 26 easy and enjoyable targeted activities that integrate body and mind to bring about rapid and often dramatic improvements in: * concentration, memory, reading, writing, organizing, listening, physical coordination, and more. Brain Gym develops the brain's neural pathways the way nature does – through movement.