Overland with Kids

The date of departure is purposeful and (aside from the savings and preparation required) has alot to do with the children’s age, robustness and where they will be already educationally. For example, we wanted AJ to be old enough to appreciate and remember what he experiences (have a memory) and to have already obtained some reading and writing framework within a school environment - i.e. the basics that we do not feel so confident in providing by ourselves. He has now reached this stage but we still have work to do to keep him strong and developing in his on-going progress.

In the same breath, we don’t want Jessica  to be too old so that it starts to impact secondary education in any way or risk her becoming too emotionally un-bonded to friends and classmates when she returns - maybe we should not be overly concerned or are worrying unnecessarily though part of us says we’re not sure we can avoid this from occurring (i.e. - we will try to retain contact as much as we can with her friends while we are travelling but we need to be careful not to isolate them from as much contact with other children while on the road). 

We are far from being experts regarding children’s educational routine but we do plan to do something e.g. provide themed topics per country. Although not at school, we do not plan for Jessica and AJ to escape some form of daily schooling. As parents, we feel that this might be difficult to get into initially but we plan to include daily journal writing, reading, spelling and maths.

We learned alot from our Summer 2009 trip - about us as parents and about our children - and the need to introduce a regular routine to keep the educational element on track.

We know there are many who would tell us not to worry about it and that the trip itself will be an education as well as an adventure but we feel we must provide input and some form of structure also - but possibly in a fun way and without anyone feeling like it is too much of a chore. We think as parents that we will have to learn to be more disciplined than the children to make it work for all of us.

We plan to visit at least two schools along our trip route  - one of these hopefully in Burlacu as part of the Moldovan Project/s supported by our Pesky Rat fund-raising projects. The second school we plan to visit within China.

We are withdrawing our children from school and everything they know, so it is important we try not to isolate them from meeting new friends and some fun times as much as possible.

As we pass through each country on our route, we are hoping the children will be able to learn many things naturally, such as, the differences between religions, cultures, languages, diversity, environment, geography, navigation, history, life skills and lots more.  Bringing the world to them so to speak - we believe it will be an unforgettable and fanstastic opportunity for them as well as us!

Our education plan for the children includes the following:

♦ Daily journals/diaries

♦ ‘Who do you think you are?’ challenge regarding meeting young people like themselves around the world and collecting data about them (will update on this with more information later)

♦ Assistance of a professional world-wide education service combined with home schooling. We also hope to be able to involve the children’s school nearer the time or try to follow curriculum to some degree. Update 26.01.10 - too expensive for us to be able to do this we have realised and we think we can self-plan.

♦ Trying to visit sites and places of interest - sometimes an education in itself for which we already have lots of ideas for.

♦ Plenty of toys, books and games (we need to think about in more detail - and see if we can load some resources also to laptop.

♦ Regular reading (daily), maths and spelling

♦Themed / topic per country e.g. Night sky/environment/weather (Norway), history of toys (Denmark) etc. Poland - the war camps.

♦As many opportunities as possible to meet and play with other children - networking and contact skills

♦Geography, climate and map-reading skills

♦Possibly meet other homeschooling parents and children to learn  how they do things and what/how they recommend we should approach things especially given our limited experience

♦Plan set time each day and evening to devote to more structured routine

UPDATE 18.01.2010 - click here for some short thoughts about what we learned/observed following our summer shakedown 2009 trip. Other than what we have mentioned, this area of our trip is very much a work in progress at present so we’ll update when we are more clear about our plans regarding this.

If you can help us with some good tips, please contact us.