Homeschooling and Kindles

Overlooking the Mediterranean Sea

Antalya, Turkey

May 17, 2010

Homeschooling

How are we traveling for six months with two children ages 9 and 11? Homeschooling. The school year in the States starts in September and this year the children went to a regular school for about the first half of the school year then we started traveling at the end of January. Next fall Ben and Amelia will be enrolled back in their same schools. On the road we are homeschooling.

We looked in to various homeschooling programs - one that was going to send us 40 pounds of books for each child (!) and others that were online courses. But with traveling every few days and intermittent Internet access neither one of those would have worked for us. After reviewing the Standards for Learning for the state of Virginia we developed our own program. We still ended up with a stack of books about a foot high which are very heavy but much used.

Some days the kids do school work before we leave the hotel for the day and some days they work while we are traveling. Ben and Amelia have done history reading schoolwork in a Landcruiser while on safari. They have read and done work on a plane to China, in a camper van in New Zealand, in a cabin overlooking a river in Australia, on a bus to the Med, on a cruise ship on the Nile, and in a taxi in Cairo (multiplication practice) and much more! And, clearly, they are getting great history and geography lessons along the way.

Ben and Amelia have also had a chance to go to school for the day in Beijing, China and Amelia also went to school for the day in Amman, Jordon with children of the friends we were staying with. The kids had a Chinese class in China and several of the classes Amelia went to in Amman were in Arabic (they teach some classes in English and she also got to go on a community service field trip that day). We also visited an orphanage school in Phuket, Thailand and a Maasai village school (one room about the size of a typical US classroom for 132 students!).

Kindle - Electronic Books

We have also taken four electronic books around the world with us - Kindles from Amazon. We decided on the Kindles because we've read a lot about getting access to English books over seas - and how hard it was to find children's English books in particular and the Kindles have international wireless downloading ability. This was a much easier solution than getting books to mailed to us as we don't know where will be. (One family we read about who traveled around the world had their books mailed to them every four weeks but at least one shipment got lost in the mail.)

The Kindles have been fantastic. Each one of us has our own Kindle and we've been able to download books from in every country we've been in except Cambodia. We've downloaded books while in the car passing farmers in rural China planting their crops, and accessed the online Kindle functions in a cave hotel in Turkey. The batteries can last up to two weeks of solid reading. Amelia has read more than 60 books on our trip as she reads during travel time and any chance she gets (and she's reading as I write this).

In Turkey they have a saying "Someone who reads so much does not know as much as someone who has traveled so much." (Roughly translated and shared with me by a woman here at Deja Vu Boutique Hotel in Antalya after she asked about our children and school and said she thought it was such a great idea to travel with children.)

We hope that learning about the world and meeting all these different wonderful people pays off for the children in the long run. It's certainly an incredible learning experience every day for all of us.

Happy learning,

Jackie