Ah, Boatschool . . .

Before becoming a writer, I was a teacher. I loved teaching. So the thought of being the lead teacher in our boatschooling endeavor brought to mind voracious reading, real-world science, and . . .

Well, OK, not rainbows, but certainly this:

This:

And this:

Of course, what you don’t see in these photos is the moaning and groaning beforehand, the computer problems during, and the shot of Polyjuice Potion (Talia’s green seasickness medicine) afterward.

Turns out homeschooling—or boatschooling in our case—ain’t all rainbows.

Fortunately, we didn’t jump into “real” boatschool right away. It was summer! Well, sort of. We pulled our kids out of public school a few weeks early but were too busy still getting the boat ready to do real school then. So we did an abbreviated schedule. Girls were expected to choose at least three activities from a list:

• • • • journal
      • blog
      • Interview crew for Q&A a Day for Kids: A Three-Year Journal (which I highly recommend)
      • Spanish—even with the premium version of duolingo there’s only so much one can do offline
    • math games—Sudoku, This is Not a Math Book, or, when we happened to have Internet (rarely), Dragonbox or Khan Academy.
    • music—keyboard (which none of us except Becca knew how to play), ukulele (which even Becca said she couldn’t play—though she sounded much better than anyone else), and flute (which Talia plays and is trying to teach her sister. This was a disaster until they negotiated a deal: Tali would teach flute; Savai would teach gymnastics. They both quickly learned how to be better students and better teachers after that.)
    • science—this was the best; John took the initiative to hold science class for our girls. He would read about unusual animals, they would take notes, then they would give oral reports over dinner on what they learned. Amazing—thanks, John!
    • read

By far the most popular and consistent choice among these has been reading.

When you’re stuck on a boat sans friends, sans Internet, sans unlimited access to movies (after Savai watched three movies in a day, we set limits), turns out reading is the go-to enterainment. Savai in particular has been reading like a demon; some weeks she averages a book or more a day. The kid would read straight through meals if she could. Plus, we each have multiple books going at a time: a real book, an ebook, an audiobook, a family audiobook, a family read-aloud book, and various guides (cruising guides, star guides, wildlife guides). And now we have school books, too.

Real school began in September while on passage from Dutch Harbor to Hawai’i. It was a rocky start. While I think our curriculum, Oak Meadow, will ultimately be great, official school was tough on passage because of the three-hours-on, six-hours-off watch schedule. There’s a lot to do on watch (sailing, navigating, cooking, cleaning, watching), and when you’re off watch, much of it is spent catching up on sleep. (The lead teacher, moi, didn’t want to give up her precious sleeping time for teaching.) Plus, even during common awake hours, there was, shall we say, some resistance to school. After one too many battles of wills, I changed the curriculum for passages to something more manageable and more practical: Create a Kids Cruising Guide for our destination.

This worked wonders. Savai immediately started researching and writing about Maui, Talia about Moloka’i. Their guides had to include:

• Written report about the culture, history, geography, etc.
• Suggested itinerary with detailed information on harbors we might visit
• Map with legend, scale, and geographical features
• Timeline
• Graph
• Illustrations
• Bibliography

I’m imagining we’ll continue this method for long passages, adding and subtracting elements as we go to incorporate pieces of their regular curriculum as it changes (e.g. the timeline and graph were inspired by Savai’s math curriculum at the time). I hope the girls will post some of their guides online.

So that’s the news on boatschooling. Not all rainbows, but definitely lots of hands-on learning:

Wonder:

And time to contemplate the horizon: