What are you doing about the kids’ education?
Thursday, September 18th, 2008This question is *the most frequently asked* one at the moment. I think people have realised that we really truly are taking the kids off for a jaunt around the world in a couple of weeks. And anyone who gives us a second’s thought knows the children don’t go to school here, but it is possibly imagined that I sit at the kitchen bench, Big Red Pen in hand, with the kids all lined up waiting for me to place marks in their exercise books and send them back to the table to correct their maths sums or fix their spelling.
I guess it’s time to come clean. Education just doesn’t look like that for our family.
Euripedes observed “Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves” and I wonder if his mates thought he was somewhat naive and a whole lot arrogant, not to mention possibly even ignorant. Certainly Aristophanes poked fun of him publically in his own plays, but who knows if this was due to educational beliefs? We’re off to discover whether or not Euripides was right.
And y’know what? It won’t be too different to our life here and now. At the moment, our days follow a gentle rhythm. After breakfast we revise some memorised passages together, read some poetry, sing some songs. While the big kids do chores, the little ones listen to picture books. Then we all pick up some handwork or get out quiet toys and listen to a few chapters read aloud from a novel. The rest of the day is free for us all to *experience* and learn.
A casual observer might reach the conclusion the children spend a lot of time playing. And they’d be right. Somehow through their play most**(see note below) of them have learnt to read and write, solve problems, get along together, invent things, create things, observe things. Various ones of them have also learnt some Latin and Mandarin, learnt to write cursive with dipping pens, learnt the rules to many sports, learnt to play piano and guitar, learnt to sew, knit, and embroider, learnt to swim, learnt to do forward rolls. They have built weather stations and made prizewinning board games, they bake cakes and mend their own clothes, they ride bicycles and play on the neighbour’s trampoline, they tend the garden and make quilts, they write books and construct obstacle courses, they observe birds from homemade hides, they re-enact Robin Hood, they have made hundreds of huts. And best of all, two or three or four of them will pitch in each night to cook dinner 😉
We’re not sure exactly how it will pan out on the road. But I imagine many things will be similar to here at home. There’ll be a gentle rhythm to every day, although no two days will be identical. We’ll begin much the same as here – except we might feed our minds before heading out to find breakfast. Although chores will be fewer (yippy-dippy-doo), doing the washing by hand will take longer. Instead of reading for hours a day, we’ll go out and look, listen, smell, feel, experience. We’ll read other people’s lives and achievements instead of books. We will, however, *miss* our books. A LOT.
But if Euripides is right, we’ll get along without them.
Besides, we’ll have our journals. Not the poetry journals, personal recipe books, creation journals and all the other ones we currently write in, but we will all have our own travel journal. We’ll write and/or draw each day. We’ll write for the blog too. No, there won’t be any grammar textbooks or spelling lists to learn, but we don’t use those now anyway. I’m a walking dictionary and the kids know how to use me 😉
We’ll also have a bag of little games; various card games (DaVinci Challenge, UNO, SET and normal cards), Rushhour, wooden letter dice, a yoyo, Brick By Brick, a skipping rope.
Plus there are the games you carry in your head; twenty questions, I Spy, guess a book character (well, our family plays this game, I’m sure you can work out how). Games, but also education.
We won’t be taking a guitar or keyboard. But we might learn more about music than we have in the previous five years. I don’t know. We’ll see.
While we won’t be cooking as frequently as here, there’ll still be plenty to learn about food. My informal lessons in eating locally and seasonally will continue.
Finally, the older children have requested to take a maths textbook. Heavy as it is, being hard-cover-n-all, we have granted their request. And we’ve thrown in three science courses on CD for good measure. General Science, Physical Science and Biology. These are intended to be a year’s worth of work each, but we just don’t do things by the book, do we? Knowing that the children will not have enough books to poke their noses into (they do that for hours every day at home), it’ll be potentially useful to have these science CDs available for them to immerse themselves in if they want to.
Besides, it gives us a quick-n-easy answer when we’re asked on the run, “What are you doing about the kids’ education?” “We’re taking a maths text book, some science CDs and they’ll write in their journals every day.” That has satisfied everyone so far!
** I say “most” because, while the two year old’s favourite activity
is “reading” and the four year old has written down her first recipe,
neither would be considered to be accomplished at either task….yet.
rayres