Homeschooling on Cool Change

Second time round and I once again really embrace our journey of homeschooling here on Cool Change. This time round I wanted to make sure I was more organized and better prepared. Back in New Zealand I already started to research which homeschooling program would suit us best. I am not a firm believer in the school system, however at that point I was still not that brave to break away from the system, so I decided that Calvert sounded great.  This gave me the little security card, illusion or back up plan.. just in case! Once we arrived on the boat I was under the impression that I could start with our program straight away. Little did I know! I did not take into consideration that just because we have done it before we can start off where we left last time; although life does not always flow in the direction you intend to go.

 

 It took us a while to get our head around living on the boat, different routine, different atmospheres, different temperature and different energy altogether. It took me a while to finally order our books and gather our learning material; I really wanted to use the knowledge and wisdom I attained from the last homeschooling experience.  I picked and choose which subject I thought we needed to elaborate on. Finally for Carlos I chose the Singaporean Math and for Julia I ordered the Calvert Math program. I wanted to enhance their writing and reading skills, so ordered the appropriate material: writing skills, fluency reading program and grammar. The other subjects I wanted to implement as we move along.

It took us a few months to get into the routine and if I am really honest I did not really start with a proper routine until we finally arrived in Grenada. It helped to meet lots of other sailing families, which were truly committed and dedicated to their homeschooling routine. I would like to express a special thank you to Michelle  on Catamaran “Jade” and Donald on SV/ Millport 2 for their inspiring energy and support that helped me to find my flow and motivation to teach my children to fly.   I am very happy and proud to say yes we are fully back and committed to learning and teaching again while living on the ocean.

Looking at the last 6 months of homeschooling I realized I am back to freestyle homeschooling. I have extended my research and explored different Curriculums; Singapore, England, Germany, the States and of course from New Zealand. They are all, more or less, have the same line it and so I took a bit of every country, mixed it all up and started to teach what I think is most important in this time and for their age. I believe that Life in itself is a school and we are here to learn important lessons. We have to live and make decisions from our heart, we have to be mindful and respectful to ourselves and others and we have to turn challenges into opportunities and embrace opportunities as they come our way.  We create what believe and we believe what we create.

Unfortunately you will not get any grades for this in today’s school system, so I still engage the kids in other subjects. We do have a timetable hanging on our fridge; however this is just for peace of mind. Not every day is the same on the boat, so you have to be flexible in your conscious discipline. We start our days with speed math – 100 equations to be solved as fast as possible. That usually gets Julia and Carlos going, unless they are in a bad mood. Then we have an hour of math – at the moment we are doing fraction revision and learning geometry in all kinds of variation. It always amazes me how much I learn while I am teaching. Our most favourite sites for this is www.math-drill.com , www.infinitegeomatry.com , www.homeschoolmath.net , www.commoncoresheets.com  and www.mathisfun.com .

We have a little break and then we continue with spelling, here I found a great program on the www.commoncoresheets.com that enables you to create different fun ways to learn your spelling words. After our spelling we integrate reading comprehension, here I have a lot of inspiration and material from the www.superteacherworksheets.com , best site after mathdrill and commoncore, those two are definitely my most favorite ones.  One hour reading on the kindle daily has improved Julias reading, spelling, writing and grammar drastically, so grammar is not necessarily making it to our daily to do list. In Grenada we had Spanish lessons, yoga for kids, book club and socializing in our program which kept us pretty busy during the hurricane season. We have now spent a few weeks in the Grenadines and Bequia and have added Science, Biology and German lessons to our timetable. It never gets boring during homeschooling and you can certainly be creative if you want to be.

 

If Julia and Carlos would let me I would start teaching early in the morning, and even though they can see the benefits, they always slip back into a late start; Julia’s words, “but Mum we can, that’s why we are living on a boat to have that freedom”. Well I cannot really argue with that, since I love and embrace that freedom for myself. There is so much other fun stuff to be found on the internet and I have now collected  so much material that I could entertain them for 8 hours every day, but unfortunately they have grown into individuals that have a mind off their own, and they have different ideas how to spend their days. Hmmm, once again that the problem when you teach them to be independent and living from their heart it might be different from what your heart likes to do. However I love the way they are working together and support each other in their learning and growing up. I always have to smile when they are confident in their own opinion and free and strong enough to voice that opinion. I know deep down I have done something right and hope that they will cherish this in the future.