Rain is falling in sheets over our clay tile roof.

For going on forty hours now, it’s been non-stop. We keep relearning the meaning of “monsoon.” The rain was so loud last night that it woke me up, through my ear plugs! The boys have pushed their bed against the wall and are collecting the drips from the hole in the tile above their room with a bucket. The sky is still so dark this morning that Tony and the kids aren’t waking up on time. It feels like it’s going to be another one of those days that makes me want to bake cookies and snuggle down in my bed with a book.

Instead, we’ll be colouring some maps, doing some math, and continuing to peck away at the formal studies we require of our children. 

We get quite a few questions about the education of our children

And rightfully so; it’s one of the things people wonder about when you don’t live in one place with a school down the street. What a lot of people don’t know is that our kids have never attended school. We’ve home schooled them since birth. this wasn’t something we switched to mid stream just so we could travel.

The answer to “Why” we teach our own stems from the fact that we have a basic philosophical difference with the framers of the public and private systems. We’re not anti-public school, far from it, in fact. But we don’t believe in one-size-fits-all education and we are exercising our right and our freedom to do the very best for our children with what we have to work with.

The “How” is easier to pin down: We’ve always schooled four days a week (I don’t think kids need a five day a week job) and we’ve dedicated about half the day to organized book work and the other half of the day to interest and adventure driven learning.

Of course, methods have changed over the years, with lifestyle shifts, the addition of new faces and the emergence of learning patterns and interests. We firmly believe that education is a dynamic, living thing, for a dynamic, living person, not something that is spoon-fed after being reconstituted like baby cereal. It’s very different with ‘tweens and teens than it was with toddlers and pre-schoolers. There are seasons to everything.

Right now my kids are beginning to stir and I hear breakfast being made and morning housework commencing. Soon they’ll be seated with books and computers open and we’ll spend the morning exploring things we haven’t thought about yet.

You’ll learn a lot about how we school our kids on the road and what we believe about education and parenting if you hang around the new “education” corner of our website.

We’d love to have dialogue with you. We welcome your questions, comments, even criticisms. After all, digging deeper and thinking harder about things from different angles is what learning is all about, isn’t it?

So what do you think? What would you like me to write about first, regarding education?