How fun that you have the Welsh connection. How romantic to be the Vicar of Chirk! That was an utterly delightful vacation and I nearly had us convinced to buy a Dutch barge to travel Europe’s canals and rivers, but we decided we didn’t want to be hemmed in.

Many thanks for your kind comments and encouragement.

Wow - that’s a BIG boat you’ve bought! But with all those kids you will have plenty of crew - and lots of fun. Yes, it would be great to meet up with you someday, in some distant corner of the globe. Have you decided where you are heading?

I’ve just dipped into your website (VERY briefly) and I saw that you have been boating on the Llangollen canal. My uncle used to live just around the corner from there - he was the vicar of Chirk - and so I have many happy childhood memories of the area and of the canal tunnel.

I think it will be a little while before we are writing books on seabirds…! Although Roxanne and Caesar are actually putting her Seagull Survey into book form.
So far as I am aware, the best seabird ID guide is Harrison’s (Seabirds - An identification guide by Peter Harrison). It isn’t totally up to date - for example,you won’t find yellow-legged gull because until four or five years ago it was considered to be a sub-species of the herring gull - but it’s the best, by far, that I’ve ever come across.

All the best
Jill

We are only just getting started. We bought one of the 72 foot steel Global Challenge yachts and brought her from England to Mexico on a delivery/shakedown cruise. She is currently out of the water having pre-emptive strikes against her rust, modifications to her plumbing and a bow-thruster fitted. We plan to throw off the bow-lines in the new year. We have four children, 15, 13, 10, and 5. We have always homeschooled, partly because we enjoy it and having our kids around, but also in preparation for our long-planned-for transition to cruising. Our educational philosophy has always been what yours is and I commend and congratulate you on your wonderfully accomplished children.

I hope our paths might cross one day, but until then, your research will be an inspiration to us and I look forward to reading your future entries.

Best Wishes
Clare Collins

Delena

Thanks so much for getting back to me. I have ordered your book as well as Learning All The Time from Amazon.

One American trait I can’t get rid of is worrying that the kids might miss out on something if I don’t follow some form of curriculum, at least to start. We are leaning toward the Calvert school just for the first year, and after that we can see how it goes with a bit more experience. One wonderful thing of the modern age is Ebay, so we have found the whole years worth of materials used for approx. $300 vs. the $750 new price tag. We will probably use Calvert as a basis and not follow it religiously, especially the American history. We are very learning oriented people so I know I will not have a problem getting out there and creating learning opportunities in Southeast Asia. I would rather teach about world religions and cultures than the American Civil War. Another resource I came across that you may not know about is eTap which has the whole curriculum from K-12 online for $400 and you can use it for multiple children. It looked pretty good but I’m a bit worried about internet access. They say you can print materials if you don’t have access, so this may be an option. I really appreciated the advice of moving aboard before hand so we can adjust gradually. I hadn’t really thought about that. We are going to begin cruising here in Seychelles. It would be crazy to leave here without seeing Aldabra!!!! It is quite a distance away from Mahe, about 1000 miles I think.

There is a small downside to living on a tropical island. It is very small!!!!! Our typical weekend starts like this. “So what do you want to do this weekend. Should we go to the beach or go to the beach.” We do love the beach, but it would be great to have somewhere new to explore and hike, and museums and cultural activities to explore.

Thanks again for the help.

Sincerely, Amy

It sounds as if you already have a pretty idyllic lifestyle, hanging out in the Seychelles - but perhaps it’s not all sunshine and sand and peacock blue water. Is there a down side to life on a tropical island?

A 41 steel ketch sounds just perfect for blue water cruising, but you’re right - it is going to be a little bit crowded with four kids to accommodate. Fun, though. And they are all quite young so won’t mind being crowded together. How you cope will depend very much on how good you all are at getting on together. If you already spend all day together there won’t be much change.

I would recommend moving aboard some months before you set off. Likewise, if the kids are in school you might want to consider taking them out a few months before you go (although this is far less important than the former). The more gently you break yourselves in, the happier you will all be. The very worst thing you could do would be to get everybody aboard just a couple of days in advance and then head off across the wide blue.
No doubt you already do plenty of day-sailing. Night sailing is very different, so far as small children are concerned. And after a couple of days at sea they start to ask, “We will go back to the land again one day, won’t we?”

As for schooling - I would suggest that you relax and take a very flexible approach. I can’t give you any advice about creating a curriculum, because we’ve never had one. And this despite the fact that, like you, I had great plans.

My son was hardly born before I was worrying about his education. He was hardly toddling before I was buying piles of reference books on every subject - everything from Maths through to Biology and Religious Studies! Most of those books have never been opened.
When he was 2 years old I was all set to buy a full course of books dedicated to teaching a child to read. But then I took a look inside one or two of them, and they were terrible; so boring and irrelevant! I thought, “I can do better than this.”

Briefly - to teach a child to read, you read to him.
To teach a child to write, you give him a pencil.
To teach a child to count, you count things with him.
There’s a little bit more to it than that - but not very much more! When you start doing it you will find that it comes as naturally as teaching the child not to throw his food around. And it’s a lot easier than teaching him how to tie his shoe laces. (I still haven’t managed to teach my 10 year old to tie her shoelaces efficiently…)

I would recommend that you read John Holt’s “Learning All the Time”.
To say that this book inspired me would be a gross understatement. It changed my life - and it changed the way I brought up my children. Basically, the message is that you don’t have to teach kids. They do it themselves, all the time.

I don’t see that you would have any problem teaching kids of such diverse ages. Just “teach” whoever asks the questions, and the others will listen in and join in.
Just choose a topic, and then get them all to do what they can, according to their abilities. You will probably find that they research and write as a team, helping each other.

Unless your children are naturally enthusiastic about keeping log books and making up their own projects you will have to get them to sit down, from time to time, and do some work. At this young age it really doesn’t matter what they study. They might be writing about turtles or dinosaurs or volcanoes or Muslims. Whatever it is, they won’t remember it - but it will affect them, on a deeper level, and they will learn how to read, write, research, organise their thoughts, use grammar correctly.. and so on. You can easily twist a project - any project - to include whatever life skills you want the children to acquire (eg. computing, drawing, making bar charts, dealing with percentages, etc). Try to choose projects which are relevant to where you are and what you are doing.

My two older kids still talk with enthusiasm of the Sealife Project that we did, over a period of months, when they were aged about seven and nine.
Another high point was the time when Xoë taught a school teacher the history of his island homeland. We’d just done a project on the history of the island, so that this eight year old upstart knew more about the place than most of the inhabitants!

We chose this flexible method not because it is easy (which it is) but because we had watched other cruising folk using the formal, set lessons approach. For the parents it was a terrible bind, but - worse than that - it also seemed to us that it made the kids hate learning.
Learning is a natural process; whatever our age, we are always keen to learn - unless forced education has crippled us.

If, having heard all of this, you still want to do it the hard way, you should take a look at the Calvert materials.

You can also find out about them by searching on Wikipedia for Calvert School.
This page is little short of being an advert, and when you read it you will probably find that the avowed principles appeal very strongly : -

“The essence of a Calvert education is a solid grounding in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The reading program uses materials of superior literary quality and stresses comprehension and analysis. Students learn to write with style and discipline under close supervision. The principles of English grammar reinforce proper written and oral expression. Basic mathematical skills are mastered so that they become useful tools in solving quantitative problems. Calvert emphasizes creative thinking and problem-solving. Integral to the Calvert program is instruction in methods of organizing work, studying for tests, and preparing and presenting research papers. Teachers help children understand and learn from their mistakes. By requiring students to correct their work, teachers encourage accountability, pride in work, and a sense of accomplishment.”

There is absolutely nothing in that paragraph that I could criticise. And if I believed that a course of Calvert lessons would achieve all this I would enlist my kids straight away. However, my natural suspicion of hype combined with my casual observation of people who are using this system causes me to suspect that there is a wide gulf between the fantasy and the reality. It seems to me that the Calvert system (and the New Zealand state home-school system, and other, similar distance learning systems) probably achieve better results than the schools - but not such good results as flexible, child-led home-schooling.

One of my strongest recollections, having glanced over the Calvert materials, aboard a friends’ boat, was the fact that the kids were studying the American Civil War. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that - except that they were hanging out in Antigua at the time. They knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about slavery or the sugar industry, or about calypso music. They didn’t even know about the local flora and fauna. There wasn’t time for them to learn any of that, because they spent almost the entire day studying, to keep up to standard.
What is the point in taking your kids off to see the world, and then not giving them the chance to really get to see it?

My older two children are now 15 and 17, and they are studying for their A levels. These are important exams in England, and if they want to be able to go to university the kids must have them - but they, and we, bitterly resent the time wasted; time when they could be studying things which are of interest and importance to them.
I am so very glad that we didn’t force-feed them school lessons, and waste their time, when they were younger.

But there I go again…!

Let me know how you get on!
All the best
Jill

Thanks, Amy