A little bit more on our homeschool

The big kids trying to figure out how much money they’d get that week to buy their travel treats.

I decided to talk a bit more about our homeschooling today.

It’s a huge topic, so I’ll just tell you about how our days have been working. If you want to, I can write more in-depth about each subject. You can also read our first post on their education here.

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Our ‘education’ routine

To start the day, they should do some yoga (the Sun Salutation, or Surya Namaskar) before breakfast. They did nicely for a week, but then they do some days and skip it on others. I do my best to remind them when I wake up, and I do with them. Unfortunately, only Coral (4) wants to do with me.

The other daily thing we try to do is a free writing practice: we just have a timer set for a few minutes (usually 5) and write whatever comes to our minds during that time. The only rule is not to stop the pencil. This idea is from Brave Writer.

Kids doing origami, which is one great activity that includes math, geometry, reading, comprehension, patience, precision, fine motor skills, and more!

Weekly, I ask them to write something, it can be anything, from a blog post, a diary page, a story, an essay on a game, something on a movie, talk about a place we’ve been, a place they wish to visit, whatever, really. They just should deliver a page to me (handwritten) every week. This doesn’t necessarily happen every week, as we might be busy with other stuff and let go of the little things, but mostly it works. Also, when they write blog posts, I ask them to deliver in English and Portuguese. It might seem a lot of trouble and they wouldn’t want to do it, but your comments make them want to, so keep on commenting, please!

They have their travel allowance calculation. We give them the new ‘house’ address and a value per a certain time or distance and they have to find out how much money they can use when we stop to buy their travel treats – and they have to do their math in the supermarket as well. For example, this week we had 48 cents/ 25 minutes. It took them a while, but they found it out. I always find it very amusing to see how they find their answers.

We also have some different projects along the way. This time, we asked them to make something up for the opening of our videos. If it turns out good enough, we’ll use them. Or maybe we’ll use them anyway. For this project, they’ve done coding, drawing, , and loads of discussing, thinking and it’s been really fun.

The kids and Angelo reading the sign about volcano eruptions. It’s amazing that they get to see and feel everything instead of just reading about it!

We had our ‘bucket list’ project and it was another experience. They came up with really cool things and arts, as you can see here!

Other than that, we just have our walks – they happen whenever the weather’s good. During the walks, here in NZ, they have amazing educational signs and we read them all. They play loads of physical stuff at home, especially Jose and Coral (like push up contests, climbing walls, and doorways, cartwheels, runs, jumping on the bed, jumping from bed to bed, etc). I should try to make Melissa participate more on those, but she’s usually busy drawing.

Every kid is different

Which brings us to their personal interests. Melissa (13) spends most of her days drawing. She used to bake a lot, but she hasn’t done it much unless we ask her to. She paints, but it’s not too often since she needs to set up all her painting stuff every time and maybe it’s too much to do every time.

Joao (12) likes reading and he does that a lot. Sometimes we need to ask him to stop reading and do something else. He draws, does origami, plays a little, but he must spend half his days reading. Thank you for existing, .

Melissa and Coral painting in ‘our’ Tongariro home. Art is such an important part of education, and every kind of art is good!

Jose (9) likes to do , and he used to do that a lot. He’s been doing less of that because we mostly can’t take everything he makes and he gets sad to leave his stuff behind. He’s been trying to help cooking or to do whatever his siblings are doing.
This is one of the bad things about traveling – we can’t take the delicate bunch of finished origami in the backpacks.

Coral (4) likes to play with her miniature animals, dragons or ponies, draw and make Blutack sculptures. She’s been making really cool stuff and drawing really nice and cute stuff (that we can actually recognize). She also loves to cook, which is cute, but sometimes I wish she wouldn’t. It takes just so much longer with her…

So, that’s basically it. They cook, clean, pack, unpack, and all that. Can you see how they can learn every subject like this? What else should we include in our daily activities?

A pin so you can read later!

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