School Ideas
Some Different Ways to Handle the School Issue when Traveling
There are many ways to handle the school issue depending on different things. How long you are traveling for? How are you traveling- staying in one place or traveling around? How old is the child? How open minded is the child’s teacher at home to different ways of learning? How open minded are you yourself to these things?
If you are staying for a longer period in one area, you can enroll your child in a local, or, if it exists, an international school. We have friends who have done this for as short as just a month so you don’t necessarily have to be staying for months in the same place. If “proper schooling” is important for you, this might be an option.
You might want to put your child in a local school along the way. They will get new friends and the support from a teacher and be guaranteed to have lots of things to tell their classmates when they get back.
Another alternative is to enroll, temporarily or permanently, your child in a distance school. Here, you can get plans for learning outside of the classroom and you get material and tests and all the help and support both the child and you as a parent might want. The number of distance schools is increasing all the time and if you are English speaking, there’s a big number to choose from.
Another way, probably the most common, is to create your own schedule together with the child’s teacher at home. You can then be in contact with the school for questions and support. Sending in material and tests is not a big thing in today’s computerized world.
You don’t even have to drag books and things around the world. It is usually possible to find some kind of internet café even in the most remote places where you can surf for information and down load and print material.
We also want to add here, that helping your child to learn doesn’t have to be a big thing. It is something you as a parent normally do every day in different ways. Depending on the child’s age, you may have to support it with organizing and structuring their schoolwork and to be there to help to find answers. You also don’t need to know everything about all the school subjects yourself to be able to support your child with their school work.
The tricky thing with educating children is when you have many children from different circumstances and at different levels to teach the same things at the same time to. For that, it can be a help to have a specific education, but teaching your own child is often easier than you can imagine.
The tuition becomes individualized and very effective. Your “pupil” will get 100% attention and you can usually cover in an hour (give or take some minutes) what takes a whole day at school to accomplish.
For us, the school question hasn’t required any specific attention when we have been traveling since we’ve home schooled permanently. We haven’t needed to ask anyone for permission to take our children for longer trips or to discuss with a teacher what they’ll have to learn when away. As home schooler’s our children have only continued with their normal way of learning but in different environments.
As support for our home schooling we have used an American school that offers a home school program. They work with families all over the world and their program goes all the way up through high school. Our oldest children now have their high school diplomas from there. You can find out more about it at www.clonlara.org
Visit Books we recommend for some reading suggestions.
