Education and Memories

Before leaving to wander, I spent hours researching online schools. Having the specific need of a child in high school who would be returning to the public school system at the end of our journey meant there were not a crowd of families who left a breadcrumb trail for us to follow. There are number of nomadic families with younger children, all of whom talked about the learning that happens organically on the road. As encouraging as this might be, and as well as we understand the value of travel on shaping the life of a young person, it doesn’t provide the transcripts the school district wants us to have so Hannah does not have to repeat anything. Those families we found with teens did not return to public schools.

Eventually, we settled on Compuhigh, an online private school we could also afford. As she is finishing the 8th grade this school year, she is completing her algebra and Spanish high school level classes, and will enroll full time in the fall. Self monitoring led to plunging wholeheartedly into Spanish and finishing so far ahead of time we are a little worried she’ll have forgotten a lot of it by the time she starts her next year, and a more plodding pace in Algebra. But, it does seem to work well, and the teachers e-mail her back (in their time zone, so, not immediately) with answers.

The fun part of home schooling is designing projects. At home, Marlie is missing her Oregon Trail storyline. We’ve put together our own little curriculum around it, with a couple of historical fiction books, a book report, a report about the hardships the pioneers faced, and an art project detailed drawing of a prairie schooner. We liked the idea so much Hannah chose the wives and mistresses of Henry the 8th for a similar project. Last night she was researching clothing and drawing a detailed dress from the time.

Yesterday was field trip day. Since we landed in Croatia, we have been keeping a fairly heavy school schedule, spending our weekdays inside at our computers. While we certainly need to balance the time we spent wandering through the twisted, narrow streets of Venice on inside the Museum of Natural History or wandering the waterfront in Geneva with classroom time, we’ve hardly seen what is around us. We wandered through the Omis city museum, with the Roman and Venetian artifacts that have been found here, and climbed to the pirate fortress Mirabella. I wonder which they will remember more, the construction of a wagon, or the details of 2000 year old coins and stone carvings.