Home Schooling
Coming from the Asian culture that values education highly and being products of the US educational system that provided us with a solid foundation, we were very conscious of our girls’ education as we planned our trip for the year. Schooling was definitely a key factor in our consideration of our trip. Hence, even the ages of our girls were factors when we decided to pull the trigger. With M entering 6th grade and A entering 4th grade, we felt these were years that our girls could appreciate and gain from the travel and not negatively impact their education too much. These were also the years when they still think well of their parents and want to spend time with us.
Recognizing, as parents, that we both had little to no experience teaching, we considered many options including holding our girls back a year once we come back from our travels – which the girls vetoed quickly – to homeschooling with the a public school, to homeschooling with a private school, to homeschooling with a charter school, to creating our own school. We ultimately decided to homeschool with a charter school, specifically Inspire Charter Schools. Here is the website to learn more about Inspire Charter Schools: https://inspireschools.org/. Given that our girls did not want to be held back a year, they have been motived to keep pace with their school work. We were also lucky to have found a charter school partner that understood our situation and was willing to work with us. The school provided us with the flexibility we needed to advance our girls’ education and at the same time, not lose out on our opportunity to explore the wonderful places we are fortunate to be at. Check out this website to learn more about the many homeschooling options and what might work well for your situation: https://thebestschools.org/magazine/homeschool-style-right/.
Our “teaching” hours are not traditional, and neither is our teaching methods. We have found that we have been able to move at a faster pace than the tradition school as we are teaching our girls on a one on one basis. As such, we typically allocate two full days of homeschooling each week, where we cover English Language Art, Math, Science, and Social Studies. In addition, the girls keep a daily journal, read on a regular basis, and learns about the next place we are going to in our travels.
We are very grateful for technology. This allows us to avoid bringing heavy books. Between two laptops, two iPads, and two Kindles, we have been able to access all the materials we need. As part of the Inspire Charter Schools, each student receives $2,600 per school year to utilize for educational purposes. This amount is divided between fall and spring. At the start of the school year, all TK-8 students received $1500 in instructional funds. The remaining balance is available after December 1st. As the teacher, you can decide how best to utilize the funds for your kid’s education. The following are additional resources we found useful:
• EngageNY has a free online curriculum for ELA and Math: https://www.engageny.org/
• We really like the workbooks Measuring Up to the Common Core for ELA, which you can order from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Measuring-Common-English-Language-Level/dp/1615269223
• Online worksheets are also available at English Worksheets Land: https://www.englishworksheetsland.com/
• We love, love, love the Kids Discover subscription which has many short science and social studies articles that the kids can read on their own. There are also additional short assessments the kids can take to assess their understanding. https://online.kidsdiscover.com/
• Core Knowledge also has nice summaries for science and social studies for K-5th grade: https://www.coreknowledge.org/curriculum/history-geography/core-knowledge-history-and-geography-units-for-3%e2%88%926/
• For fun science projects, check out Super Charged Science: https://www.superchargedscience.com/science-curriculum/
• MobyMax is another subscription that covers math and ELA. The girls are familiar with it from their old school and we use it for review: https://www.mobymax.com/
To understand what your child should learn by the end of the school year, here are the CA standards for each of the different subjects:
• Math: https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/ccssmathstandardaug2013.pdf
• ELA: https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/finalelaccssstandards.pdf
• Science: https://www.cde.ca.gov/pd/ca/sc/ngssstandards.asp
• Social Studies: https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/histsocscistnd.pdf