Education On The Road

Many people have asked us how we have managed the education of our children during the year on the road. A year is a long time, certainly a long and crucial period in the development of two kids less than 10 years old.

We fully appreciate the importance of learning and so have tried to educate them in the most rounded way possible. To do this, we have used the following:

A traditional textbooks and teaching method approach
Local learning centres
A specific educational project
A general world schooling philosophy

To achieve the first element of this, we brought with us all the learning materials that the children’s peers would have been using in Ireland throughout the year. This meant that “Busy at Maths” and “Small World” were part of our daily 1-1.5 hours of schoolwork. With myself and Laura assisting and correcting their work, the kids have been able to complete their schoolbooks at the same pace as they otherwise would have. We believe this is a method that has worked well and is something that we will look to continue during the year ahead.

The second element of education during the year has involved the use of local areas of learning. Specifically, in the larger towns and cities, this has involved visiting libraries, exhibitions, galleries and museums. We have learned so much about the different South American cultures, the history of each individual country, and the books and art that expresses what life on this continent is like.

The third element we availed of was a wonderful “escuela libre”, or “free school”, that we found in a nature reserve just south of Bogota in Colombia. These types of schools join together children of all ages, in an open and self-directed learning manner. The facilitators will take the lead of the children and organise activities based on the desires of the children. This could be building a tree house together, baking food, learning a new musical instrument, reading about about a new culture, or pretty much anything that naturally grabs the interest and attention of the kids themselves. We stayed for two weeks and could see the growth and development of our children in this short space of time. We plan to utilise such places more as we travel in Central America in the year ahead.

The fourth and final learning element our kids have availed of is world schooling. But what exactly is the worldschooling philosophy we hear you ask?

Worldschooling is an educational movement that recognizes that a student can receive no greater education than by experiencing and interacting with the world around them. For families able to make it work, this often involves traveling together and using the journeys to enhance their children’s education.

For us as a family, the worldschooling education methodology is one that we have used a huge amount, all throughout our adventure. Yet it is something that happens pretty naturally as we navigate each day, each country and each culture.

For example, after every border crossing we have to understand the new currency we will be using. We have involved our children in this from day 1, asking them to do the conversions into Euro so that could understand the cost of things in our home currency. Grocery shopping is also a great method of learning. From the price of daily essentials to that of their beloved Kinder Eggs, they have had to use mental maths to realise what things cost.

Each country we have been to has been unique in so many ways. Without prompting, the kids have taken it on themselves to do country-specific projects about the things that interested them the most. From animals to sport, historical sights to native tribes, they have learned and detailed so much along the way.

Geography has also been a massive part of what the kids have learned through the year. While South America has obviously been the focal point of such new knowledge, they have also branched out and chosen to learn about flags, countries, cities, mountains, deserts, rivers, lakes and jungles from all over the world. We have no doubt that this desire to learn has come from our day-to-experiences of new lands, people and cultures.

It is also worth mentioning the soft-skills that we have seen our children develop. Before leaving Ireland, we often saw a shyness or reluctance to play with new children in a park or playground. We managed strong emotions relating to arguments with friends that could not be processed themselves. This year has opened up the kids in a way that they now embrace making new friends whenever and wherever they can.

They have also developed many more internal capabilities to handle friendships that they did not possess previously. They now have “friends around the world” as they say themselves! This in itself has also been a big learning, as making a friend and subsequently saying goodbye to that friend is not easy and requires further soft-skills and emotional intelligence to process.

So overall we have been delighted how the education of our children has gone in the past 12 months. We really did not know how they would adjust and develop educationally to the huge change, but we could not be happier with their progress in all regards.

We hope to continue the learning as we traverse Central America in the coming year!