Quite a number of people have been asking us what we are doing to educate the kids while we are traveling. So one month into our trip, for anyone else interested, we thought we would write about what we’ve been doing and how it is working out for us.
First up though, we’re of the view that travel is a great way of learning in itself. Even at the ages of four and six, we reckon it expands the mind in a fantastic way. It’s for this reason that we’re not overly concerned about the kids missing a year out of their ‘formal’ education.
That said though, like any parents, we obviously want to give the little ones the best opportunities and make the re-integration into the school system as seamless as possible when we get back, with their level of ‘hard skills’ like reading, writing and maths, being to a good standard.
To do this, we first looked at the NZ correspondence school and enrolled to find out more. However, when we received the first few weeks of material in the post, we quickly realised that this solution would be completely impractical. While some of the course was online, the huge extra weight and space needed for the physical material, and the co-ordination and cost of sending and receiving tranches of it made this an option that we just had to rule out. Not least for which is that we would need to know where we are going to be at least a month in advance for the material to get there in time, which would severely restrict our flexibility.
So, we decided that the only real practical option for us was an online system (or mixture of systems), that loosely follow the NZ curriculum, mixed with integrating learning into our travels in a practical way.
One such system that was recommended to us by Sofia’s school was ‘Studyladder’, which has versions that follow the USA, UK, Canadian, Australian and NZ curriculums. We’ve found it to be very good, but it has the major disadvantage that it is all ‘Flash’ based, so can’t be used with the iPads or android devices. It was our intention to use this when we have access to a hostel PC, which unfortunately is proving to be not very often as these seem to be a thing of the past, giving way to travelers hooking up their own mobile devices to the hostel’s wifi. We could try Internet cafes, but they are often far from an ideal environment for kids’ learning so we may end up buying a small and cheap notebook computer.
So until now then, we’ve mostly been using an eclectic mix of iPad apps. Having kids of 4 and 6, we’re fortunate enough that we can just focus on the ‘three Rs’ – reading, writing and arithmetic – and there are no shortage of apps that address these subjects for this age range. Some good ones that we’ve found (in order of how good we think they are) are:
Reading
- Reading Raven
- Lola’s ABC
- Eggy 100
Maths;
- Math Age 3-5 and 4-6 (Euro Talk)
- Bugs & Numbers
- Native Numbers
- Math Bingo
- Splash Maths
Often we would sit with the kids and go through the exercises with them, but on the whole they are very intuitive and our input isn’t always needed (or wanted). For example, yesterday evening Liam was sitting quietly by himself using his favourite maths app (Eurotalk) and following his ‘teacher’s’ instructions, begun skip counting without any of of our involvement. The apps are all in the format of games and they want to play them – so much so, that playing the games are viewed as a ‘treat’ and form a part of our healthy parenting regime of threats and bribery.
For Sofia’s writing, we get her to draw a picture and write a short story about stuff that we’ve done in a day and go through it with her after, pointing out correct spelling and grammar etc and reviewing the words that need more work over the next few days.
With her reading, we’re quite fortunate that she really enjoys it and it is just a case of finding books of interest to her – anything involving fairies, ponies, unicorns or princesses usually does the trick. She has a couple of physical books, but there is also a good service offered by the Wellington library (most major libraries would have the same service) where books (and audio books) can be accessed via iPad.
We also integrate learning as much as possible into our journey and try to give a lot of simplified information on how things are in a place we’re visiting. Also, we do simple little things like calculating change that will be received back on a taxi ride, etc. Spontaneous adding and subtracting competitions often break out during long bus rides and while waiting in restaurants etc.
So, that’s about all of it and it seems to be working OK for us so far. We tend to spend an hour or so at a time of day that suits, and relax it a bit when the kids are doing other learning activities like the spanish classes.
School time at our hostel, Puerta Vieja, in San Cristobal
