Category: Unschooling

Advay (my 8-year-old) has a friend in our gated community who is in his second year of engineering. When he was at home for his semester break, Advay would visit him often and watch him play the keyboard. In roughly a week’s time, Advay would come home and share with excitement about this new tune…

As a child, whenever I got myself to stick around for long in the vicinity of this phenomenon called “question”, it was always followed by something called “answer”. Q&A – Questions and Answers. They never existed in isolation. It was scary to just be with a question. If there was a question that I no…

One key skill that every self-directed learner must nurture is the ability to read books of interest. I am not saying that reading is a skill that is more important than other skills like making friends, playing, etc. I am saying that reading is a critical skill that one must pick up as a self-directed…

The word “multiplication tables” brings back memories of only one thing from my childhood – “mugging”. As a child I simply had to learn multiplication tables. I couldn’t ask for a reason why. My parents would explain to me the benefits of learning tables by-heart. They would even give me sufficient time to learn it.…

This is a story of how Advay (my 7 year old) pulled together random experiences from scrubbing coconut shells, to dismantling an old washing machine, to discovering a motor to making an electric coconut scrubber.

Our family has a lot of music enthusiasts. My sister-in-law (my older brother’s wife) is a trained vocal artist. Their oldest son (Avyay) has taken training in Mrudanga and Advay has sat around him during his practice sessions several times. My cousin brother, Sujith, plays the Guitar. Another one of my cousins, Suhas, plays drums.