Boat School

This page was created after a few requests to give you a glimpse into our boat school. I hope this page will help you if you are thinking about boat schooling or homeschooling. We are by no means experts in this area. This is just some information about what we have experienced so far. We will try to keep this updated in the future. If you have any questions just drop us a line in the comments section or send us a message through the blog. I will use boat school and home school interchangeably for the rest of the post.

Do you homeschool your kids???? 

This is the #1 question that we get when we meet people. The answer…..Yes, of course we do.

Here are some of the other common questions that usually follow the #1 question:

Is it hard to teach your kids??

Yes, somedays it can be challenging but it is something that can be done. If you are thinking about this type of adventure do not let boat school be the reason you do not go. Remember that kids are built to learn. There are so many resources for home/boat schooling that you will be able to gather lots of information from and lots of tips and tricks.

Do you do online school?

We do not but there are some amazing programs out there that are available. We can't do an online curriculum because we do not have reliable internet connectivity. I know it is crazy! It is hard when it comes to researching. We are so use to just looking things up on the internet and there are times when that is not possible. I wonder sometimes how we ever made it to adulthood before computers and the internet! You do find ways. One thing about this lifestyle is that you will become more resourceful.

How did you pick your curriculum?

There are so many options out there to choose from. You can pick a curriculum in a box such as Calvert. Everything is packaged up by grade and comes with a schedule. We chose to put together our own set of books based on reviews and help from others who have gone down this path before us. I will go into more detail below about what we chose.

How did you set up the kids records with the county?

In Florida there are three buckets that you can belong to in education: public school, private school, and home school. You must belong to one of these buckets. To move over to the homeschool bucket we had to send a letter of intent to the homeschool office for our county. Once we did that and we were approved we formally withdrew the kids from their current public schools. It was a hard day when we said good-bye to our wonderful elementary school.

Do they tell you what to teach?

If you belong to the home school bucket they do not dictate the subjects that you teach. The requirement is that you have a certified advisor review your child's portfolio at the end of the year and they submit a letter to the county stating whether or not the child has progressed throughout the year. When you start doing research you will see umbrella schools that are called homeschools. From what I understand they work a bit differently. Sometimes they can dictate what you teach or what counts as curriculum. We always look for fun things to throw into the curriculum. It could be a trip to a museum on an island or a cool science project. In Green Turtle we were buying frozen squid to feed the turtles and we realized that the squid was pretty big. So one afternoon we decided to dissect some before we went to feed the turtles.

Did we have the right tools?? Not really but we used what we had available.

Sam really loved this activity. 

I wonder if Emma could tell us how she really feels???

How long is your school day?

Our school day is generally 3 hours long. This can vary based on everyone's mood that day.

How do you keep track of classes?

I have a pencil and a planner. There are many ways you can do this and many ideas out there. This one seems to work well for us. I use a teacher planner and each kid has three columns (ELA, Math, Geo/Hist/Science). This helps me keep track and it also is easy for them to read what they need to do that day.

A basic teacher planner I found on Amazon. 

What have you learned so far?

1. The most important piece of advice about boat schooling that we can give is: BE FLEXIBLE!! You have to take everything you think about school and schedules and throw them out the door! You are no longer have to be on a Monday - Friday schedule. If you are on passage on a Wednesday you may skip school that day and have a school day on Saturday instead. Or if you have a great morning for a snorkel you may postpone school until the afternoon. The schedule piece has been the most challenging for the kids to understand (and hard for us too). They are excited to skip a day during the week but they think we were crazy when we have them do school on a Saturday. The other part of being flexible is to be willing to change the curriculum. A certain book just may not be working after a few months and guess what? That is ok! You are the teacher and principal of your school and you can change it! We have already changed math programs to a more independent learning program designed for homeschooling. Another piece to be flexible on is pace. If one of the kids is struggling with a concept or a subject you have the ability to stop, take a breath and maybe a break from another subject to help them focus in an area. For example, Jack is not very excited about the writing process. He just doesn't want to learn the draft, edit, final copy process. So right now we are holding off on our other ELA workbooks and we are focusing on a book study where he writes a little everyday about the chapter that he read that day and the next day he will edit what he wrote and make a final draft. This will be the process for each chapter. The questions are different everyday so my hope is that it will keep him interested.

2. A valuable piece of advice from another cruiser was to limit the books that you buy. Do you need three language arts books??? Not really. It will get overwhelming very quickly. If you are space constrained it can also lead to some storage issues. I tried really hard to follow this rule and we did pretty well with our core subject books but then I wanted to get some fun books from MindWare and Critical Thinking Co. These are the books I went a little overboard on. I am a sucker for a good puzzle book!

3. The Cruiser Teacher Struggle -Big Picture vs Little Picture - Sometimes I get discouraged if things pop up and we just don't get our formal day of school done. For example, if we have a lot of passages during the week we don't get the amount of school done that is planned for that week. We had some pretty bad weather in January so when it cleared up few weeks ago we had some days where we went snorkeling after only an hour of school. We also had a day when we had a car for 24 hours. We had to get up early and just go to get all of our errands done before the end of the day. Will they be ok? I have to remind myself that yes they will be ok. Will they still learn what they need to? Yes. Overall in the big picture we they will learn!

4. The Cruiser Teacher Struggle - Little Picture vs Big Picture. I feel the reverse when it comes to the kids learning certain skills. Primarily with writing or anything ELA related. In my mind I see the big picture. Such as a well written essay that goes through all of the steps. Maybe it is a great history report on an island. Sometimes I have to take a breath and focus on the baby steps and I am hoping the big picture will come in the future.

Our Curriculum:

Oak Meadow Grade 7 History and English. You have to buy the reading list books separately. 

Oak Meadow ELA and History for 7th grade (oakmeadowbookstore.com)-

We quickly realized that 7th grade history could be just about anything. Some programs have world history some have US history and some have civics. We showed Emma the different options and she chose Oak Meadow. So far we have enjoyed this program. The reading list was good and the history lessons have a wide range of focus so it has been fun to move through the weeks. Originally we picked the ELA because of the reading list and they say that you can do the ELA separate from the history but as soon as you look at the book you realized that is not the case. Most of the writing assignments are in the history book. She actually chose the PAC World History curriculum but we ended up returning it. I didn't even open the package from PAC.

Our Spectrum Books

Spectrum Books (Amazon) - 

From recommendations from other people we chose Spectrum books for a lot of the subjects for the boys. Both boys have writing, reading, and language arts from Spectrum. Jack and Emma have Spectrum Science books.

Emma and Jack's Geography book and Sam's Daily Science and Geography

Geography (Amazon) - 

We have a completely separate book for Geography. Sam has Daily Geography Grade 1. We have found it a little slow only doing one question a day so he usually does 3 days of questions in one day. Emma and Jack are doing the same Geography book - Discovering the World of Geography. We are starting with the first one for Grades 4 & 5.

Daily Science Grade 1 (Amazon) - 

This is Sam's science book. It is ok. A bit too easy with one question a day which is the same issue we have with his Geography book so he does 2-3 questions a day.

Sam's Singapore Math Books

Our new math books- Teaching Textbooks

Math -

I had this curriculum picked out pretty early but for the 2nd semester we have changed things a bit. We started out with the Singapore Math program (common core edition). If you go this route make sure that you take the placement tests. The Singapore Math level and the grade level do not always match. This is a good program but it was designed for a classroom setting. Sam is still using it but Jack and Emma have moved over to the Teaching Textbooks math program. Teaching Textbooks is geared toward the homeschooler. It is a computer based program that runs off of CD-ROMs. Kind of old school but it works for us since we can't do an online class. The lessons remind me a little bit of Khan Academy. This program seems to coincide with the actual grade level. Sam did not get this program since it starts at Level 3 but when he saw Jack and Emma's new math he wanted to try it too. So Dan brought this back from the states with him in January. Right now Sam is doing both programs but we work together on the Teaching Textbooks instead of making it all independent. We just started the Teaching Textbooks program so I don't have a solid opinion on it yet. I will keep you updated.

History - 

For Jack and Sam we have The Story of the World history book by Susan Wise Bauer. It is a narrative history book so it tells a story. We have not really used this too much so I can't say too much about it. History tends to follow us from island to island.

Teacher Pay Teachers -

This site is amazing. There are wonderful teachers out there that create some pretty fun things to do in school. I can spend just about the same amount of time on this site as I can on Pinterest (that is saying a lot!). We have gotten ideas for independent book studies, spelling lists, book challenges, country reports, cool science bundles, etc… It is definitely worth a look when you are pulling your resources together.

One of our dice games - The Area and Perimeter Race

Dice and Cards - 

I have bought many games. I am a board game buyer. We soon realized when we started cruising that two things are a must in the game department. A good deck of cards and some dice (more than just the regular 6 sided dice). You can almost leave all the other games behind if you have these two things.

A small handful of our other books.

Other Books -

As I mentioned before, we did pretty well with our books and not making it overwhelming. But right before we took off I went a little crazy with the "other books". These are the fun books we throw in during the week or maybe they are done if we are having a smooth passage. We bought all of the different Perplexor books from Mindware and we bought several books from The Critical Thinking Co. It was more time consuming picking out the Critical Thinking Co. books. I went through the whole catalog and picked the ones I thought would be fun.

If you have any questions please feel free to send us a note!