Educating kids while travelling

[UnintentionallyMe]

Thinking of selling up and travelling - not sure where or how yet, but have wanted to do this for so long and certain events (death of a friend, possible cancer diagnosis in family) have made me realise life is short and to not put off dreams.

We have 2 DDs, one going into P4 and one starting S1. Obviously their education is a priority for us.
Both my DH and I went to school 'as normal ' and other than lockdown homeschooling (which we were rubbish at!) have no experience of alternative methods of education.

Any ideas what options there would be, pros and cons, and what the end goal should be (eg we're in Scotland so it's highers at the end of high school).

We want them to experience and learn so much by travelling, but not at the expense of their future career opportunities.

Thank you.

Hi, I did this with 5 kids. They were 9, 9, 3, 3 and a baby. I'm a teacher. We bought a caravan, travelled around Europe as far as Greece. We did it for 9 months and ended up settling in France for 5 years.

The older
Ones did education every day 9-12. I bought a load of English and maths books and they worked through them. It was 10 years ago so before the time of all the online learning platforms there is now. We did lots of learning on the spot, they did practical maths (what the most popular nationality in the campsite and created tally charts, graphs for example) and writing for a purpose. So a review of Pompei, a diary, a letter of complaint. Reading daily as well.

I can honestly say it was the best 9 months of my life. They learnt so much being in so many different places, cultures and became independent young adults.

In terms of relationships-we did move around a lot but also spent weeks at a time in one place where we met some like minded families and have made life long friends that they are still in touch with.

I'd say go for it-the positives massively outweighed the negatives.

PM me if you want more info especially for ideas for education. Also our route we did was awesome-can give you campsite recommendations.

There's lots of assumptions being made about our financial and home situation. I hadn't alluded to any of that in my post - I was simply asking for options about how best to continue our childrens' education outside of the UK school system while travelling.

We will have a home to return to in the UK, and I don't believe we need previous extensive experience of travelling to make it work.

Alot of the comments sound like what I'd hear if I tried to discuss it with people from our local community! Believe me, we're looking at all positives and negatives and weighing them up. So far travelling wins 😁

Sorry, I read back and realised I said "selling up and travelling" 😳
Plan would be to sell our house and buy a smaller one - releasing equity but still having a property to come back to.

Hadn't meant to use that phrase.

Hi OP!
I home educated my kids who were similar ages for 18 months. We stuck to making sure they could string a sentence together and manipulate a few numbers. We concentrated on doing lots of reading, some map reading and being really solid about their times tables.
What I discovered, was that left to their own devices, they'd immerse themselves in subjects that interested them. Very often, getting interested in something (say, horrible histories) that would cover quite a lot of writing skills, history obviously, imaginary play, art/sewing, geography. I encouraged them to do projects quite a lot.
There are so many online resources now which weren't available then. We did those maths workbooks. If you think long and hard about what goes on in school over the course of a day, you'll realise that they can learn a lot over the course of a couple of hours a day.
There's the added benefit of all the things they learn simply by travelling. They will pick up an open mind for a start. Language skills, people skills, culinary skills perhaps.

One of the thinks you need to be aware of is having fun and not feeling you have to turn everything into a 'teaching moment'.

If they are bright kids they will probably be slightly ahead when they go back into school. And certainly it's not that hard to pick up odd details that they've missed.

To add- they will probably mix with other people of varying ages whereas in school you get lumped in with people by dint of having a similar birthdate. You'll also benefit from spending a lot more family time together. We found it a wonderful stage in our lives and they've become very lovely and gainfully employed and self employed adults.

@BananaStraw thank you for such a positive and interesting response.

I agree, there are so many informal learning opportunities in every day experiences. They both have a thirst for knowledge too, so that should help too.

Projects sound like a good way to hone lots of different skills, and double up as a keepsake of their travels.

@UnintentionallyMe my pleasure! I think with bright and interested kids you'll be fine! Wishing you all the best. We did end up with youngsters who query things and don't do things just because 'that's the way it's done' but I suspect you'll embrace that!

When I traveled I rented my property out. It had more than doubled in price on my return. It didn't occur to me to sell up.

And based on my experience I would recommend you do not sell your assets to travel around the world on a whim.

Just go on super long holidays in the summer and rent your house out whilst you've gone to pay for it

I can't imagine anything worse than travelling around the world from place to place with young DC permanently on the road

As someone who is very well travelled this is my idea of hell

I would find my enjoyment of travelling the world somewhat ruined and completely wearisome having to think about what to teach my DC everyday.

I think bright motivated kids with committed parents probably do well under homeschooling. My biggest concern would be teaching science to the eldest, my DC (who are slightly older) did not enjoy their lockdown science teaching at all and it's only been since their school teaching started including regular practicals again that they have started expressing a lot more enthusiasm and now are talking about science A levels. I think travelling naturally will expose them to the humanities much more but you'll have to think carefully about how you'll teach science at secondary level with no lab equipment.

There is online schools

I haven't read all the responses as I started to get bored when people got critical! 😂

I think you might need to change the way you are looking at home education. It doesn't have to replicate school in a lockdown-Esque home schooling way. It if was me I would map out, with the children, where you want to go and take it from there. Look at their interests and feed them into your travels. Do they like ancient history? Take a look at places like Mahablipurum or Hampi in India for example. Are you visiting Naples? Learn about tectonic plates - volcanoes, earthquakes, E.t.c... The list is endless as to what they can learn and really it depends on where you decide to go.

I would then probably also try to keep up with some age appropriate English and Maths and that may be where I would personally fall down and might employ the services of an online tutor or online courses.

It sounds like an amazing opportunity for you all

I'd just get the Bright Red (or similar) course books for BGE Maths and English for your S1 and work through them as they seem to match quite closely what my daughters did. The rest you can just do as you go along, learning a language, talking about the history and geography of the places you are in etc. They will learn so much just travelling.

"There's lots of assumptions being made about our financial and home situation. I hadn't alluded to any of that in my post"

My comments were all based upon you saying you were selling up and travelling for around 2 years. That you were rubbish at home school during covid and that you wanted the kids to slip back in to school after "travelling" but that you had no idea what that might be 🤷🏽‍♀️