How we worldschool
Our children have been home educated for the past few years, so it wasn’t that much of a leap from home-ed to world-ed … what better way to learn about the world around us than to go and find out for ourselves?! We are fortunate also in that our lines of work lend themselves to a digital nomadic lifestyle, at the moment anyway, and so we were able to look into how we might make this campervan/travelling dream work for us.
How you worldschool is a bit like how you homeschool (or ‘home educate’, as we prefer to call it … it’s not school!). By that, I mean that there are as many ways to do this as there are families who choose it. You need to prioritise flexibility; a life on the road naturally lends itself to surprises around the corner. Predictability is less of a feature than it usually is! You also have to trust in the process. Learning happens organically, and this is learning through living (as our dear friend Eleanor has been espousing for years!).
I must admit to every now and again getting an attack of the heebie-jeebies that the kids’ handwriting is deteriorating or some such concern – that’s the deeply ingrained schooling in me coming out. This post could ramble on for ages if we started into home ed philosophy, what our aims are, why is everyone so exam- and job-focused, not to mention mental health … but suffice to say that we feel that this environment has enabled us to expose our children to a range of new cultures, languages, histories, and we hope that this will stand to them for the rest of their lives.
In Ireland, when you’re registered as home educating your children, it is established as part of the registration process that you are meeting ‘a minimum standard of education’ for your child or children. However, there is no requirement to follow a particular curriculum or to enter your child for assessment or exams. Our choice as a family is to adopt somewhere between a semi-structured approach and that of unschooling, depending on where we are, how people are feeling, what other opportunities are around us … as I said above, flexibility is key. The honest truth is that we have veered further and further towards unschooling, the longer we have been in this game, because we want to find what works best for our two children who are very different from one another!
We do have maths and grammar books with us on the road but, to be honest, they’re not a source of joy. Well, the dictionary is an exception and we all have Kindles, so we have access to any amount of reading material in that format as we wish. Olwen’s most recent acquisition was Katie Kirby’s first book for children of around Olwen’s age and she estimates that she has read it over 70 times already! Tech is, of course, a big feature, more so when you don’t have access to a library and so on, on the travels. We utilize a wide range of online resources for entertainment and furthering our knowledge. The children participate in online classes, too, which have of course seen an explosion in number since the start of the pandemic. Over the time we have been on the road, they have both done regular yoga and Joe Wicks fitness sessions; language learning on DuoLingo and various fun brain training apps; Morgan has an online coding mentor with whom he has an hour-long session every Monday; the kids both take part in Theatre of Science live classes on Tuesdays and Saturdays; and we’re now looking into Outschool as a source of more learning opportunities. Our current areas of interest are coding, trains, train history, online security, video editing (Morgan) and reading, animals, the human body and pyrotechnics!! (Olwen).
One thing we have discovered on our travels is how fortunate we are, in Ireland, to have permission and indeed the right under our Constitution to home educate our children. Many countries do not afford this right to parents and indeed can go as far as to remove children from the family home and even jail the parents if the children do not attend school! We have been so shocked to hear various personal stories as we went on our travels, of what lengths families have ended up going to in order to escape a system that was causing trauma to their particular child. We have certainly counted our blessings.
There are many other families who are out there on the road, finding out what the world has to offer. Here are some of the blogs we enjoy following:
This is the first blog I ever came across when I discovered that ‘worldschooling’ was a thing! An English/Australian family who backpacked with their two boys for six years: What is Worldschooling? (We did it for 6 years)! | World Travel Family 2021
This link is to the blog of a family of four who travel for six months of each year: Worldschool Adventures
And here: Traveling Families Blogroll | Worldschool Adventures they list a huge number of other blogging worldschool families ❤