Phantom of the roads: Bus education

This is our third year of homeschooling, and first year on wheels. Once you get the wheels rolling, learning at home is quite an enjoyable experience for children and parents. I spent our first year worrying if our eldest was on par with other children her age - not that I ever really had any reason to be worried. It was just all new to both of us, and I felt like I should be testing her progress somehow.

Now that we have two enrolled with home education plus one keen to "attend prep", I've really had to let go of any ideas of how they should be learning. They all process information in their own way, and have different interests in life; just like my husband and I are two unique individuals with different approaches to life, for example. We've been doing workshop type learning around different themes instead of breaking the children's learning into separate subjects, and it seems to be working well for us. And this seems to be the new trend in education systems world wide:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/finland-schools-subjects-are-out-and-topics-are-in-as-country-reforms-its-education-system-10123911.html.

Like my husband jokingly says, Finns must have got hold of our curriculum somehow!

I must say while we're travelling I hardly have to plan any learning at all, it seems to be coming to us. Yesterday we bought a new oven for the bus, and since we've done all our cooking on stove top for the last few months, the girls were so excited about a chance to do some baking again, they wrote/illustrated their own cake recipes. Reading is most often not a problem, as new places always offer plenty of information in written form. At the most basic level it might be an Anzac memorial teaching our early reader to spell out "Lest we forget", but as to our eldest, she reads anything and everything out there for the younger siblings. Tourist information centres always have fun activity packs with crosswords and colouring ins, and nature is a never-ending resource for learning. Like the mating moths we found today. We seem to be on an extended excursion, and like in Sydney a couple of months back, a fire engine stopped behind us and offered a tour for the kids. Once upon a time I did plan to take the children to a fire station, but again, it came to us!

- M -