What about homeschooling?

A lot of the time we get asked the question how is it to homeschool the kids? This is something we are still in the process of trying to figure out. Is this even homeschooling? There’s a minefield of different trends and vocabulary in the travelling families jargon that range from unschooling, homeschooling, worldschooling, roadschooling…it was a whole new world to discover. Here’s the rough break down for the uninitiated: Homeschoolers follow a school curriculum from home; roadschooling is the same but from no fixed abode; world schoolers use what’s around them as educational material; and the unschoolers are actively trying to make sure their kids have no structure so that they have the freedom to educate themselves, if and when they want to. Within this wide range we have touched on it all. It was amusing on our rare encounters with other families, to find parental judgement between these communities. A serious Belgian 4 hours a day family tut tutted at our pathetic timetable while a family of French naked hippies on the beaches of Greece looked down their nose at us for doing the times tables as we were ruining our children’s creative systems. Just like within any range, people will move to the extremes of the definition and polarise themselves from those on the other end. It was amusing to see this in home education too!

Sometimes people want to know the practicalities and how we arranged it. In Spain, homeschooling is not legal. The constitution states that all children must attend school. However it’s written in such a way as to be open to interpretation, leading to plenty of arguments. The bottom line is it’s in a grey area of the law.

Obviously we didn’t want the social services on our backs or to have the boys repeat the year they missed which would defeat the whole purpose of taking a year out. This meant we had to do things with some care in order for them to go back into the education system afterwards. We spoke to the department of education, the school inspector, the school principles and teachers… we filled in some documentation and without further questions – got permission to take them out for a year on the basis that we had to be outside of Spain. They don’t have to fulfil any curricular demands, don’t have to do any exams and won’t have anyone checking up on them along the way. That was the first hurdle out of the way.

The next part was planning. Zev is only 9. I know his teacher well and she gave us the books they would use the next year but between us we agreed he probably wouldn’t use them. As long as he’s doing some maths, reading and writing then the content doesn’t really matter at his age. Aran is a different ball game as he’s 14 and next year has to go back to school and not be lost – so it was important that he stayed up to date with the curriculum and again, his teachers gave us all the material his classmates would cover.

With practicalities out of the way we started a bit of research as to how people did it. We read blogs on homeschooling families and their experiences and tried to find tips and advice, but to be honest, it mostly bogged me down as I found the information endless and every family is a world –  to think whatever someone else did will work for you is not realistic.

Apart from the academic stuff we were concerned about being very alone. Would our kids meet anyone along the way? We started to resarch pop up hubs, community meets, and travelling family meets. Despite hundreds of social media based groups, for the large part it seemed a way to commercialise on parents wanting to homeschool but not feeling adequate for the job. Most were a kind of costly summer camp for families, allowing the parents to have a cocktail while their child was taught to tie a knot or some other fantastic life skill.

We decided to trust in our own abilities and in September on leaving, we were armed to the hilt with school books, journals, magazines, reading material in English and Spanish and thoroughly convinced that we would produce beautiful lesson plans and execute them with proficiency.

However…

I forgot when imagining my mobile classroom, that what we actually like to do is hike up mountains,  ride bikes and find empty beaches and are probably unlikely to be painting colourful harbours as a family watercolour lesson. That said, I think we have made a decent shot at it all.

Structure has been the biggest issue and that’s supposed to be provided by the parent so admittedly we are to blame for that problem.  Homeschoing or whatever version of it we are offering would be much easier if it was scheduled per day, with a timetable. The trouble with this, is it simply didn’t work for us and allow for the freedom we wanted. We wanted to be free to follow the weather, be up early if that was the plan, and be flexible. Although we started off with a stricter idea we felt a little hemmed in as we got going.

We more gradually moved towards lots of education on rainy days, less on sunny days, more when we were based in one place, and less when there was lots of moving, more spontaneous learning when we were surrounded by history or visiting museums and more structured learning from the school books when in the caravan.

We didn’t make it easy for them, dragging them at times with no warning in from their bike ride to start into schoolwork at 6pm due to a sudden parental panic of not doing our duties. Instead of getting up early to do schoolwork when their brains were fresh we would drag them down a river or up a mountain and then insist on their full attention knackered later in the day. I don’t know if that was the best plan but we managed it. Or they did.

The biggest successes have been the projects based on something around us: Vikings in Denmark, ancient Greeks in Greece, glaciers in the Alps, communism and politics in Albania, etc. Zev has journaled through writing and pictures throughout the year and learned to read in English. They have learned bits of languages and spoken French. We have covered the basics of Aran’s curriculum in all his subjects with the help of free amazing online resources but of course it was with a few groans here and there, and not only from him. What they have learned beyond the curriculum is anyone’s guess. As parents we still question whether it’s enough, if they’ve spent their time wisely, will they adapt again when they go back to school….Who know’s? I don’t think there’s a right or a wrong answer. We have done the best we can. It wasn’t easy and it certainly wasn’t perfect, but it was fun (most of the time!)