Brenna's Life Changes
In response to this on the UnschoolingDiscussion list:
I would love to hear from anyone who has teenagers who are unschooling who
are doing cool things. They need not to be terrified of speaking in public,
and
need to be planning to attend the Unschooling Conference in August.... I have PLANS... —[email protected]
Although, we are fairly new unschoolers, my 14 year old daughter, Brenna, has
been doing very "cool" things since we came home from last years Unschooling
Conference. She went with us loaded down with her academic books from a
homeschooling co-op which included
Anatomy and Phisiology, Geometry, and World History. She truly came home a
changed child. She quit the co-op and those textbooks are gathering dust . She
read Grace Llewlyn's "Teenage Liberation Handbook", made a quilt with
quilting pieces from the conference raffle, started sculpting, became very involved
in photography, planted strawberry corn, which is in pots all over our house,
in preparation for a small green house she is designing, went back to writing
poetry(which is all over her bedroom floor), decided to direct a play this
spring and has found the play and a facility as well as a group of homeschoolers
to act in it, became interested in vegetarian cooking and made a wonderful
dinner for us all last night. She and I took a wheel building class and learned
to throw pots that we gave friends and family for Christmas gifts.
I
continue to just be in awe of her enthusiasm, energy and the joy she brings to her
days. She has always been very self-directed and has homeschooled since she was
eight but her energies went into "school-like" pursuits. There was very little
of the joyfulness evident that I now see in her every day.
This morning , she has discovered boxes of pictures that I never got into
albums and is working on a scrapbook of her life so far. She is also involved
in community theatre and enjoys public speaking.
Brenna...would love to be involved in any
way at the Live and Learn Conference this year. We will definitely be there.
After the changes in our lives from last year, I wouldn't miss it for
anything.
Gail
(who now even drives around with unschooling bumper stickers
in our extremely conservative and religious homeschool community)
Gail's family moved to a more liberal, artsy area later.
2016 additions—Brenna went to college for a while, and left to learn more about pottery. Here is her online store: Brenna Dee Ceramics
and her blog Pottery and Pastry—
The Blog of Brenna McBroom
More on
teens
or
parenting for unschoolers
or
deschooling
or
strewing
.
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