Homeschool Recap: A Year Without Borders

Homeschooling our kids during our travels was a huge part of our year, and not something we took lightly. I spent numerous hours planning, worrying, researching, and getting advice from a close friend that homeschools her children. We had some bumpy moments, but in the end – teaching and learning alongside our kids this year has been one of my favorite things. Here they are on the first day and last day. I always love seeing how much they’ve changed! Alexis said it looks a little bit like she shrunk. Don’t worry, she didn’t – Braxton just grew A LOT!

Math, Field Trips, and Everything Between

We didn’t use a set curriculum for the year, but made sure our kids hit all the major subjects. In addition to those, they both picked something they wanted to pursue on their own and spent time each day working on that. Alexis spent her time writing a memoir about this year, and Braxton learned to code on the Scratch platform.

The rest of our school hours were spent studying whatever country we currently called home. We learned about WWII from the Japanese perspective, the effects the Brown Tree Snake had on Guam’s ecosystem, and various forms of government throughout the countries we visited. We studied the Vietnam War, crawled through the Cu Chi Tunnels, and visited a museum we will never forget. The kids learned about apartheid, what it’s like to live as a monk by interviewing actual monks, the differences between school systems around the world, and so much more!

Learning by Living: The World as Our Classroom

I had numerous people tell me before we left that we could skip all formal teaching and our kids would still learn a tremendous amount. They were right. The kids learned currency conversion, how to navigate airports and train systems, and how to adjust to new living situations. They saw what extreme poverty looks like and experienced discomfort with language and cultural differences. They endured some very different living conditions with small spaces, unfamiliar food, and undrinkable tap water. They also learned that the world is amazing, and beautiful! Traveling opened all our eyes to the fact that there’s no right way to live and you can be happy with far less than you think.

Here’s a slideshow of our memories from learning around the world and some fun stats about our year of homeschooling.

Homeschool Life in Numbers

Number of students: 2

Number of teachers: 2

Number of school days completed: 172

Number of snow days: 0

Number of Field Trip Fridays (not always on a Friday): 44

Number of research papers written (combined): 15

Number of presentations completed on various topics (combined): 13

Number of novel studies finished (combined): 21

Current number of words Alexis has written for her book: 86,277

Number of different games Braxton created through coding on Scratch: 57

Number of power struggles over math problems and paper corrections: a lot!

Number of extremely proud moments: also a lot!

Number of tabs on a very detailed spreadsheets to track it all: 43

Number of victory dances to the Rocky soundtrack when something was completed/passed with 100%: too many to count!

Two Kids, One Year, and a Lifetime of Lessons

I am unbelievably proud of how well our kids adjusted to a different way of school this year. It’s not easy to have your parents as your teachers when public school is all you’ve known. They worked hard and we all learned a lot! In Colorado we always celebrated the last day of school with ice cream sundaes. We kept with that tradition and got gelato. Schools out for the summer – we did it!!