http://travelswithanineyearold.com/2010/05/23/homeschooling_unschooling_travelling_family_rtw_education_learning/

Keep it up!
Jason

Follow your brothers lead, now & when you return. They don’t need school to maintain friends & can SOAR without a dying school system. Always choose freedom!!

Congratulations for your efforts and thoughtfulness about teaching Colly and Kyle. It’s never easy, and I’m convinced that kids will learn and be resilient in spite of their parents! But with such caring and thoughtful parents, I think you can’t go wrong. Give yourselves credit for the experiences you are providing them by traveling and exposing them to the real world. As people point out to us while we are here in Kenya, not all children get the chance to experience another culture and live in other countries. It will shape their lives in ways that we can’t anticipate (hopefully mostly positive!).

Because we are staying in one place, we have enrolled the girls in a local international school that follows the British system. We could have gone to an American international school, but we thought this would be more interesting (no point in coming here just to try and make it like home). Plus it’s closer to our house. The girls love their school and their new friends who come from all over the world. I have brought along some books from school and bought some online including leap pad books (which they love). Plus they have their diaries and write a newsletter every month for 4-H and Carlee’s school paper. I feel like as long as they have the writing, math and reading down, the rest is icing on the cake. East African history is not in the California State Standards, but frankly it’s much more interesting! Our biggest problem is fitting in all the travel I want to do before we have to go home! I’ll play a game with Carlee to teach her the states and their capital cities later.

Thanks for your very descriptive posts. We’ll have lots of notes to compare later!

Lots of food for thought, thank you!

PS I’ve added you to our blog roll

Re: your conflicting teaching styles:

Both of the mind sets informing the two approaches are equally valid (obviously). I would want to give my children an exposure to a healthy dose of both philosophies and step one for me would be structure and predictability. Block out days or big blocks of time in which the dominant philosophy to dictate the course of the day will be yours and on another day let the dominant philosophy be that of your husband’s.

I would never present it as such to the kids because I think it is important personally for the curriculum to be someone opaque and not one where parts are strongly associated with “mom’s way of doing things” vs. “dad’s way of doing things.” Just agree with your teaching partner what the schedule is and make them head-master for that day.

But just my 0.02, or 0.001 Uraguain pesos I suppose.

Inspiring post! I can’t wait to follow it through out the year!

Great post.

My first impulse was to keep this comment short: “Morgan is right!”

But given that this is an issue close to my heart, I figured I’d go ahead and explain just why I think he’s right. And, to give you (and your readers) some perspective, Karen was Morgan (and I was the fretful you) way back when she first started wondering just why we should send our kids, whom we were having so much fun with, to school in the first place—and this was when we had tuition-free access to Monica Ros, a terrific private pre & elementary school in Ojai.

I freaked—much as you seemed to be doing, Sarah—and my first impulse was to try and recreate the classroom at home (there’s a useful distinction to be made between “homeschooling”—whose not entirely unjustified stereotype has an overly large family of fundamentalist Christians all gathered around their desks—arranged in neat rows as if this were really school, not home—dutifully saluting the flag and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, God and all) and “unschooling” which is what we quickly wound up practicing (c.f John Holt’s Growing Without Schooling website) and toward which Morgan seems currently inclined.

Kids are naturally curious. They’re going to learn if we can simply get out of the way. When you think about it, autodidacts—doing essentially what Colly and Kyle are doing right now—have a much, much longer history than those “institutionalized” learners, whom we for some reason now take as the model. Certainly, they’re the norm; but when you think about it, what’s really “normal” about what happens in school? John Taylor Gatto (twice New York State Teacher of the Year) presents a pretty scathing critique of the public school system in his “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling” in which he includes a useful analogy between the public school and the public library (in the former, learners are segregated by age and ability; they read books written by committees, not individuals; and just as they’re getting into a subject, someone blows a whistle in their ear and tells them to move on to something else). Another book you’d really enjoy is by those unrepentant Marxists, Stanley Arononwitz and Henry Giroux, who, in their terribly titled “PostModern Education” unwittingly make the academic case for homeschooling (both are big believers, as I am, in publicly funded educational opportunities, but question whether public schooling, as currently constituted, represents much of an opportunity for education).

Anyway, as a public school educator, my biggest concern is with the way in which the very institution of the public school manages to teach all these terrible lessons even before we get the kids in the classroom. The most insidious of these is the lesson that learning is time and site specific—i.e. that for these 45 or 50 minutes (and only during this time) you’re going to learn about math; and then you’re going to move on to another room and learn about something which we adults are implicitly telling you is entirely unrelated. Emerson also wrote that “nothing is more sacred than the integrity of your own mind,” and yet, one way or another, public school—as an institution—is forever dis-integrating learning. The next step for something that is presented as unrelated is to have it become irrelevant in the child’s mind, and I worry that, as an indirect result, the first thing we crush out of kids is their natural curiosity (and this happens long before they reach my classroom as juniors or seniors). Ask a kid—any kid—what their favorite part of school is, and I’ll wager their answer will either be lunch or recess. In other words, kids see the best part of school as NOT school. Clearly, we’re doing something wrong.

Of course, many teachers can and do overcome these obstacles to authentic learning; but speaking from experience, it’s hard (and frustrating) work. By contrast, taking a much more holistic approach to learning—letting young people experience life unmediated by state-sanctioned lesson plans and their corresponding standards and benchmarks—just seems so much more appropriate for kids like Colly and Kyle. And what incredible opportunities you and Morgan are creating for them!

So relax, have fun, and be amazed at their growth in the coming year!

Martha

What wonderful, thoughtful insights to your year of travel and views on road schooling. What you and Morgan are teaching Colly and Kyle cannot be matched in the ‘physical’ classroom and observing, touching, seeing and experiencing out in the real world is something that none of you will ever forget. These are truly life’s lessons. Soak it all in. -Sarah