How We Worldschooled – Angela’s Family
When it came to worldschooling, I overplanned and overpacked.
When our family decided to embark upon a Wonder Year, my number one concern was how we would educate our rising fourth- and seventh-grade kids. They had been cruising along in public school, and we were attentive parents to their progress, but we certainly weren’t in charge of it. And now we would be, completely. We were also relocating after our travels, so we wouldn’t have the opportunity to work with their current schools to create a plan together. We were on our own.
As someone with no teaching experience who had left the education of my children wholly to those public schools, I was starting at ground zero. And as is my way when I don’t know much, I dove into researching, planning, and organizing—learning about homeschooling methods and gathering curriculum options, books, websites, and tools. I talked with other homeschooling families and included everything they were using on my list of possibilities for us, wondering how we’d ever choose. All the while feeling quite overwhelmed about how to do it right. The fallacy.
My original question of *How will we figure out how to do this?* quickly morphed into *How will we ever choose from all the ways to do it?* I felt an enormous responsibility to keep my kids on track, make sure they could successfully return to “regular” school, and not let them down. Months of research resulted in a game plan—in the form of a spreadsheet—that I now look at and laugh. Truly, best-laid plans.
I made sure we’d cover it all—every subject offered in their brick-and-mortar schools. I identified the times we’d “do school,” planned how to balance across two kids and two teachers, allocated days, and designed tracking methods. Then I purchased loads of materials—textbooks, workbooks, teacher’s guides, test kits, Kindles, journals, art supplies, and a portable printer. I secured an online Latin tutor for my older son and purchased a piano keyboard for my younger. I gave each kid a school cabinet in our Airstream and a whiteboard to track weekly progress on the RV wall.
Game plan: check. We were prepared with a capital P.
And then: letting it all go became one of the most gorgeous, revolutionary experiences of our Wonder Year.
Within the first month, the schedule fell apart completely. One day we decided to forgo the two hours of online science lessons we’d planned so we could hike to the bottom of a volcano with friends instead. It was far more fun to hunt through the local woods, competing to find the biggest pine cone. Day excursions took the place of math lessons, and at night we were too tired from kayaking to muscle through reading assignments. But we were living. Living in ways we hadn’t in a long time and deeply enjoying our extended time together. No one wanted to disrupt a card game to shuffle off for noun/verb exercises. Art lessons? A few, but mostly they felt forced. More engaging were the times we collected shells and researched their tiny inhabitants or cooked a creative meal together in a stranger’s kitchen.
Schedule: scrapped.
Formal learning ended up feeling like a distraction from experiencing the now. We wanted to grab the organic learning opportunities all around us, not look down at books and worksheets. Shifting our gaze created time to explore, absorb, and wonder.
The coolest part? Learning as a family. Because we were doing it together, we parents didn’t need to “loop in” to what our kids were learning. The teacher/student roles dropped away, replaced by shared experiences. We could ask questions and talk about what we’d seen and heard during our days. If there was something we didn’t understand, we researched it when we had Wi-Fi, and occasionally we asked the kids to produce work—a written reflection, presentation, or art piece—to deepen their learning.
Our crazy planning was replaced by observing, inquiring, absorbing, debating, and discussing. Once we replaced the *what to study* with *how and why* inquiries, our Wonder Year blew wide open.
Practically speaking, our worldschooling ultimately looked like this:
We still did a bit of “official” school. We traveled part time in an RV and covered the essential textbook lessons during those times so we didn’t have to worry about carrying gear.
When we switched to backpacks for international travel, we took photos of key pages to read while traipsing through the desert, but honestly, we left most of the book learning in the dust.
We kept some structure for math and language arts since those follow a sequence in traditional school. Math lessons were learning and practice, with no tests. Language arts was lighter still: spelling during car rides, journaling, and story writing during quiet times to practice grammar and punctuation.
Everything else—history, science, geography, culture, world language, art, and music—we absorbed through our travels. We were opportunistic with what the world presented to us, and learning became every day, all day—a natural part of living, not separate and distinct from it.
