Schooling

Q: “Are you bringing a tutor?” “Will the kids stay back a year?” “Who’s going to teach them?”

A: No. No. Dana (and Greg).

Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that the “Six Explorer Global School” home-schooling curriculum is now a 30-page document that includes:

• Commentary on balancing academic learning, coaching on Guiding Principles and life-lessons
• Outline by child, by subject matter on what we will teach
• List of Kindle Books purchased for both school and pleasure reading
• Study guides from DS teachers on writing and analyzing reading
• Valuable insight from home-schooling mavens Laura B and Diane S

In fact, the school superintendent just approved our plan last week!

Fortunately, the kids’ only cumulative subjects are Math and language. In order to keep the kids on par with their classmates, we actually are dragging 2 math books with us (1 for Alex and 1 for the other 3). Fortunately, my engineering education should allow me to teach Algebra and 6th grade math! Realistically, as long as I stay one day ahead of the kids, we’ll be OK. Language instruction will be done by Rosetta Stone (Alexandra and Emma are taking Spanish and Latin, the Boys are taking Chinese and Latin) and forcing the girls to speak Spanish when we are in South America.

We do plan to read the same books as the school where they are available on Kindle and add many books relevant to the area we are exploring. There will be lots of writing: hand-written in journals, typed posts for this site, and longer pieces to fulfill the practice of narrative writing.

The other subjects will be covered in the global context. For example, physics at Victoria Falls; chemistry in the salt plains of Botswana, colonialization and industrialization in India and Southern Africa, 70’s US policy in Vietnam/Cambodia and ancient civilizations where they existed.

Our current plan is to try to get ~1.5 hours of structured learning per day, preferably in the morning. We’ll see how that goes.

Despite all these efforts, we do recognize the real win academically will be if we can return with four kids who can truly understand the current status of each country – historically, politically, geographically, demographically, economically, etc. For all 29 countries. Now that would make them global citizens.