Boat Schooling
Living full time on the boat with the kids means you have to make some decisions regarding the school. During our journey we have met several families traveling like us full time on their boat. The majority of them are doing home schooling (or boat schooling to be more precise). I really admire the total commitment of the parents to undertake the academic education of their kids, regardless of the amount of time they need to invest in the adventure.
Living on a boat also gives the kid the opportunity to learn from the environment they are exposed to: new cultures, new languages, geographical features around them, climate changes and more, these are all concepts that might be abstract or boring for kids if they were taught only in an academic manner.
Victor and Paul are in 8th and 4th grade respectively. We enrolled them last year with EDUWW online school, which is based in the US and in Austria thus having their cursus recognized almost everywhere. Their platform is extremely well designed and very flexible, making it perfect for people like us on the move. Their program follows the US curriculum up to the 12th grade, with the social studies mainly oriented towards American history. They propose a lot of interesting electives courses such as medicine, accounting, business, spanish, german etc… On the platform, the kids can complete their lessons and assignments at their pace and have weekly meetings with their tutor to monitor their progress and answer any question they may have. Group classes are also available online however they are not mandatory.
On average, Victor and Paul dedicate between 2 and 4 hours daily (including weekends as living on a boat means it is Sunday everyday). This is normally sufficient to keep-up with the suggested pace in their calendar. They completed their previous grade about a month earlier, allowing them to start right away the new school year.
The whole program is in English, which was a bit of a challenge for Paul last year when he started, but he made such a progress that he soon will be fully fluent! In addition he is taking Spanish while his brother took German.
With all that being said, we have been extremely pleased so far with this online school, the tutors are extremely dedicated to their work and the administrative team is very responsive. You can find all the details of the school on their website, including the tuition fees.
