Dear Friends of FamilyPlace,

Greetings and Happy New Year to you and you family. May 2010 continue to bring you happiness and peace.

With 2010, FamilyPlace is getting to be 12 years old - this means, secondary schools for Malaysian. This also mean evolution and change in focus for our lives - focus on  education, to be more precise alternative education.

You may know that we homeschool our children - very much in the unschooling approach. Our children will be 14, 13 and 5 this year and they have been very much unschooled, though they may have had some schooling experience. Through our unschooling, our children learn to learn, they become curious of thing s around and perhaps most importantly, they find and follow their dreams with passion.

Never mind if their dreams may be short-termed, nevertheless dream ARE important. Lifeless are people without dreams and passion. They are also continually encouraged to look at more academic aspects of learning but in a very different approach. At teenage, we are beginning to see a strong balance between the interests in academics and the creative. At the same time, we also feel that our children needs to have a good awareness of their community and society including ecological environment.  Above all, we feel strongly that the we learn and teach has to evolve. We cannot use a bullock-cart to drive in today's highway - what more in the highways of the future. Education is the preparation of our children for the present and future.  Much of our thoughts are shared in our Learning Beyond Schooling Website Site.

Needless to say, unschooling our children - takes a lot of time from us, especially when one of us is working a regular job. You will notice that we have not been updating FamilyPlace as much as we would like to. However we have been updating quite regularly on  Learning Beyond Schooling. We are also committed to help parents who are exploring such alternatives.

With effective today (Jan 4, 2009): FamilyPlace will remain an archive of our parethood journey, our thoughts and opinions on parenting. All future updates will be on Learning Beyond Schooling. FamilyPlace's mailing list will still be active and we will continue to update you of updates and activities.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all how have made FamilyPlace what it is today.

We therefore, invite you to visit LEARNING BEYOND SCHOOLING

Thank you and once again, a very happy new year 2010.

K V & Wai Leng