My daughter has been sitting at her computer for hours and hours and hours everyday. While originally it was disturbing to me, I've since changed my thinking.
. . . .
She's been playing Youtube. For those that don't know what that is, it is an online video blog, somewhat like Myspace. She spends hours looking up videos, pictures, and music, cataloging them in files. They are all anime, some of them are tv shows, some you can only see through Youtube because they haven't aired in the US. Our library has a very scarse and limited supply of anime and manga. So, for her this is a self made resource for the things she loves. Self made, meaning she found this resource on her own and starting researching and cataloging all the things that she had been trying to find elsewhere. (How cool is that?!)

OTHER PARTICULARS ONE FOR ARTISTS: http://resuki.deviantart.com Gina Trujillo's page, as a sample, and the main page For MUSICIANS: MySpace, with http://www.myspace.com/halfmoonblessing Cameron's band's page, as a sample, and the main page is http://myspace.com/   *Lots of people who aren't musicians are there, but it's music-rich and music-friendly. Weird Al has a page: myspace.com/weirdal Holly mentioned Pure Volume and if anyone wants to offer up an unschooler's personal page for me to show as a sample, send it here: Sandra@SandraDodd.com For PHOTOGRAPHERS: flickr http://flickr.com/photos/radicalunschooling/207811458/Ren Allen's page, as a sample, and there's an unschooling group pool. The home page is easy to get to from those. Plain old Blogs are at the bottom of the page (ideas and samples)

She has so many pictures now, that she is able to cut and paste them into video making programs easily, to string together stories of various characters and put music to it to showcase on her Youtube account for others to view and rate and enjoy. She's made all kinds of friends that regularly view and write to her Youtube account, just like a myspace, but with the added interest of anime.

To keep up with her interest in anime, she reads the books that correlate to the shows and practically memorizes them all. She is able to dissect each and every one of those books and shows and can tell you where they deviate from one another.

I can tell you this, there is no way I could keep up with what she is doing. She asks for help throughout the day for various things like uploaded something, spelling help, etc. Mostly she figures it out on her own. She's made video spoofs on other people's videos, she's made her own videos using our camera and recording odd little displays of neighbor children behavior and posted them, or sometimes threatened to post them as black mail to get her friends to behave nicer than what she's videotaped. Oddly enough this technique has worked well to get kids to stop fighting about something. She's so discreet that they never know that she is videotaping them. We've talked about rules and copyright laws and posting policies and all of that. She's knowledgeable.

Meanwhile while the neighbor kids are trying to keep up with what she's doing, they are incumbered by parents who won't help, or won't allow or won't do "whatever", so they come here and do whatever my daughter is doing. I'm not really doing anything except allowing her the freedom to do what she wants, everything else is all her. The worst thing I could do, is be her road block, which I thankfully recognized as being my road block, and got out of her way.

So for all parents who feel anxious about what their children are or aren't doing, the best thing to do is to do nothing and examine yourself until you feel confident to jump in and share the experience that your child will gladly share with you. The worst thing you can do is get in the way of that wonderful creative process blossoming right there in front of you that you may not even see. I learn something new everyday, even things that are soooo totally obvious, I look back and wonder why I ever saw it different!

Jenny (Jenstar)

BLOGS, plain old blogs

Usually finding one blog will lead you to others, especially if the blog is a member of a "blogring," which is a group with a link to go to other blogs in that group. Here's my unschooling blog, which is used just as a little family news site: SandraDodd.blogspot.com Another way to use a blog is as a collection. Some people have photos with a theme, or write editorials on a particular topic. I have one on clues in songs and such about what "being in love" is. Pam Sorooshian has a collection of ideas about math for unschoolers: Joyful Math. Joyce Fetteroll has a beautiful one with writing ideas: Dragon Writing Prompts

More and more magazines and TV stations and such have blogs instead of regular webpages. There are advantages and disadvantages. You can often comment on blogs, and that can be cool.