Home Educating While Abroad: A Beginner’s Guide

Homeschooling your children can be a daunting task, but doing it while traveling abroad? That can be downright scary at first thought. There is, of course, a lot to consider. You may want your children to have an immersive educational experience. Or, you may want to focus on art and music in Spain. Two months later, when you’re in Greece, you may want to them to learn about science. You might favor a schedule that balances out the curriculum in a more traditional way such as focusing a little on each subject per day. Whichever way you choose to create your homeschooling environment, here is a starter guide to help you navigate the waters.

Know the Guidelines

The first step of this process is to understand the guidelines in your country of residence. You can find tons of resources online to help you determine not only what you should focus on, but also can direct you to ideal support materials, books, and lesson plans. If you have more than one child, you will need to create a learning environment that encourages all children and challenges them at different levels. You will need to time complete your research. Try to organize your educational plan as far ahead as you can.

Local Classes

Generally, children learn more by doing than by being told. Do a little research ahead of your trip(s) to scout out local classes that support your curriculum and the particular interests of your children. Kids can learn first-hand how to make cheese or care for animals in an agricultural setting if they love the farm. Is one child a budding chef? Schedule as many cooking classes as possible to encourage his or her interest. Recognize that cooking reinforces math, science, and reading skills. Maximize each experience for wholistic learning.

Online Resources

There are many online resources available to homeschoolers, like Kahn Academy and Minecraft Homeschool, for instance. There are also innumerable online apps and games for kids to play to enhance their skills in all subjects. There are even sites for everything from learning computer coding to foreign languages. Here’s the cool thing; with homeschooling, kids get to experience their world in a variety of ways besides just reading about it in textbooks. As a homeschooling parent, you can spend extra time working on particular areas of interest with supplemental online resources.

Achieving Balance

Most parents choose homeschooling so they can give focused attention to their children’s education while having the time to bond and connect as a family in more creative ways. Take a moment to understand how your child learns best and tailor lessons and assessments—however you may do them—to their particular style, but be sure to challenge them. Think creatively when presenting information. Make sure they are not only learning their hard skills like math and science, but also soft skills like empathy and how to communicate.

When you travel abroad with your homeschoolers, they become worldschoolers. When children are worldschooled, life is their classroom and the world is their playground. They are able to discover what it is to connect in truly organic ways with all types of people. They won’t watch action play out on a television. They will learn to live their lives fully at a young age, and that is a world-class education.

If you’re a world-school parent, let us know what works for you at [email protected]

Joy Chasers was created by Naima Petz as a means to inspire the cultivation of a joy filled life. It follows the journey of her family of five from living ‘the American Dream’ to selling everything, and setting off to discover the world as full time wanderers. In her off hours, she can be found world schooling the kids, searching for sustainable fashion, or plotting the next adventure.