Are you putting off your dreams of exploring far off places for fear of schoolwork and activities your kids will miss out on while they’re gone?

Have you fell in love with the notion of worldschooling your children to make them better global citizens but don’t love the idea of having to become their teacher as well as parent and now travel guide?

Not convinced that homeschooling while you travel will work for you but convinced that homeschooling and long term travel have to be synonymous?

Well, I can’t say how your kids or your family will deal with worldschooling, however, I can tell you about our personal experience with educating our kids while we travel the world.

Is worldschooling for everyone?

Before we answer that, I believe it’s important to define worldschooling. In its simplest form, worldschooling is getting an education while you travel, with an emphasis on incorporating your journey into the curriculum.

Traditional Worldschooling Methods

While there are many ways for children to get an education while they travel, this post talks about the most common ones we, and many of our fellow travel families, have explored over the years.

Homeschooling: Where the parent takes on the role of teacher and educates the child themselves, usually with a rough outline and somewhat keeping pace with standard curriculums.

Distance education, online learning or e-learning: Where your child is enrolled in a school, but taught at a distance with a teacher, usually online.

Unschooling: Where children learn through life experiences that you or they initiate without following any standard curriculum.

Local schooling: Where children enroll in either local schools or specialized schools in the area that they’re currently visiting.

How to become a worldschooler

This post is actually in response to an email we received from a concerned mom who wanted to break away from it all and travel the world, but was nervous that her kids would miss out on going to a normal school. She wasn’t sure that worldschooling her kids was for her.

We understand her concerns and probably yours if you’re reading this. We thought long and hard about travel with kids even before we started our own family. Considering Micki and I got engaged in Thailand and then later married in New Zealand while on a year long round the world trip, you can understand our desire to keep traveling once there were more than just the two of us.

Tip! If you want to travel and homeschool your children, look into the laws about homeschooling in your country. Some, like our home country of Canada, have relatively liberal homeschooling laws, but others, like Germany, have restrictions on homeschooling.

That said, we’ve traveled with our kids since they were babies, and though we once again have a home base in Canada, that wasn’t always the case. You see, we jumped around Canada and the world for years at a time.

How We Homeschool on the Road

Once our kids were old enough, and we happened to be back in Canada for a stretch, we usually found ourselves enrolling the kids back into regular public school.

If we were gone for an extended trip, we would enroll our children into an e-learning distance education class where our kids would chat with a dedicated teacher from back home a few times a week and got assignments that way.

How we combine regular school and distance education online

In our province of British Columbia, Canada, online learning. is essentially distance education offered by our public school system. It’s a provincially accredited online K-12 program with the same curriculum as physical schools in our province.

Our kids were taught by a public school teacher employed by the online learning education department. This meant that they could go back into a regular, physical public school at any time, and be at pretty much the same place in the curriculum as other students from the grade. Many Canadian provinces offer something similar. There was no cost for this.

Typical weeks would see us emailing photos of their physical work to their teacher, and there was also some online work they had to do. As they get older and past the “learning how to write with a pencil phase”, more and more of their learning takes place online.

To stay connected, they would chat with their teacher via Skype, or by email when they needed additional help. Even though we were out on the road somewhere, our kids still roughly followed the same learning plan as they would in school back in Canada.

Unlike a lot of traveling families, we’ve never officially homeschooled our children or even unschooled them. It wasn’t that we didn’t believe in it, it’s just that neither of us ever wanted to be teachers, and for the duration of our travels we were lucky enough to have an online version of our public school curriculum. It also didn’t hurt that there was no charge, and that Canada ranks as one of the best public school systems in the world.

The nice part about e-learning, or distributed online learning as it’s called here in British Columbia, was that they still had a teacher that assigned and checked their work. We were strictly the helpers who made sure the kids completed their assigned tasks. Of course, we were also always on hand if they needed help and support.

A few bonuses to online distance education while you travel

To be honest, being able to be there for our kids is one of the biggest pluses to what we do. When you travel extensively together, you have way more hours together as a family than regular 9 to 5 working parents have.

If you enjoy your you time, don’t become a long term traveling family. You’ll likely get tired of always being together.

Luckily for us, we’ve always enjoyed spending time with each other, so our lifestyle generally works well for us.

The greatest part about following a more standard education while we travel is that we can still work, research our next move, and enjoy wherever we happen to be without also having to make sure our kids learn the basic necessities they will eventually need in life like reading, spelling and math. Having a teacher guide them also forced us to not completely ignore their schooling since, for the most part, assignments and timelines were out of our hands.

In truth, that alone kept us honest, otherwise I know a more traditional education would have faltered if it was dependent on us finding the time to create, assign, then mark their schoolwork while on the road.

World Schooling via e-learning

A cool aspect about the Canadian e-learning classes they took was that the teacher, used to dealing with students on the move around the world, would often assign projects based on where we were.

For example, our kids learned about democratic history while we were traveling in Greece, the home of democracy itself. Our son Cole was especially interested in how governing bodies are formed and who gets a say in a country’s development.

That trip they also learned about the Age of Exploration in Portugal while walking the same cliffs that Henry the Navigator walked on while ushering in the European expansion to Africa, China and the new world in the 15th century. The names of Dias, Gama, Columbus, Magellan, Drake and Vespucci became part of their world and gave our kids courage in exploring their own world.

Even while on holiday exploring the Mayan ruins in Mexico, our kids studied ancient civilizations and their effect on societies today. As a bonus, they also became experts on chocolate and can tell you exactly how cocoa beans were originally harvested and how they go from fruit to finished product.

In terms of culture, after watching the flamenco being performed in Spain, our kids and their teacher decided to learn about different dance and music styles around the world and, having a multi cultural dance off with your kids, is nothing short of fun.

More recently, last year, while we were exploring the Galapagos Islands, they learned about Darwin and his theories of evolution. That same trip, they learned about the Amazon rainforest and it’s effects on global weather before we had the opportunity to visit the Amazon for ourselves and see it firsthand on our Ecuador Amazon tour.

Worldschooling regardless of education

No matter where in the world we’ve gone, we’ve tried our best to tie the kids learning with where we were currently staying. We like to think that it has spurred their imaginations and made them more aware of how we’re all connected.

Though some of that learning was spurred on via a teacher, it’s not to say that when we happened upon an interesting place, event or historical figure that we wouldn’t do our own research as a family.

The truth is that learning new things, seeing different cultures, embracing different ideas and exploring the world around us all come hand in hand with long term travel. Let’s face it, if we didn’t already have an innate curiosity to our world, we wouldn’t be traveling anyway.

Travel as a learning tool

In terms of education, just being in a foreign location is enough to spur curiosity and learning. For instance, our kids learned Spanish while traveling through South America and their curiosity about marine animals was peaked while snorkeling with sea turtles and sharks in Belize which, in turn, lead to plenty of reading about marine life and habitats.

Even our trip to Harry Potter World at Universal Studios was a result of our daughter (who was eight when we went) reading the entire seven-book Harry Potter series while we traveled. Now, it’s not conventional learning, however her reading speed and vocabulary improved a lot because she wanted to read the complete series as quickly as she could. (See our Wizarding World of Harry Potter tips here).

Homeschooling on the road

I honestly can’t talk a lot about homeschooling on the road, however, we have friends who have gone that route and their kids seem to do well. Some have even pulled their kids in and out of different schools around the world while homeschooling as they moved from one place to another.

It’s interesting to read that many studies these days conclude kids actually do better with homeschooling (if done in a structured form) than traditional schooling. See this article from Gwen Dewar, PhD for a helpful look at homeschooling outcomes.

Homeschooled kids get much more one on one time and frankly, even though their school days are a often few hours rather than an entire day, they seem to retain what they learnt better than children in traditional classes. Homeschooling may also get them past their awkward adolescent stages easier since they don’t tend to get caught up in typical school drama such as bullying or peer pressure.

We decided a few years ago that a more standard education, coupled with our own self-driven desire to learn and seek out new worldwide experiences would work for us and so far it has. Our kids do well both in school and out when we’re on the road. There’s even a name for this type of homeschooling and traditional schooling mix: it’s called hybrid homeschooling, and it’s becoming increasingly popular.

Going to school in a foreign country

The beauty of travel is that you can put your kids into schools around the world or continue to teach them yourself. So many more parents are traveling today that there are way more options than even a few years ago.

For instance, we have some American friends living in Spain who put their kids right into the Spanish school system without knowing more than a few words in Spanish. The first few weeks were awkward for them, but they were soon fluent in Spanish and thriving in their new school environment. You can find out more of Heidi and Alan’s story on their blog, Wagoner’s Abroad.

It’s just more proof that you don’t need to follow any set rules while long term traveling. That’s the beauty of it all.

We’ve even taken our kids out of school for three months and without signing up for e-learning. Both their principals and teachers were aboard. We learned the basics of what they were going to teach in that time frame and just taught it ourselves as we went. It was probably the closest we’ve ever actually came to homeschooling, and when the kids got back it only took them about a week to fully catch up and keep going.

Education matters, exactly how, not so much

The truth is that your kids will likely be fine no matter what you choose as long as you cater to their educational needs and make it a point that they continue to learn as you travel.

The negatives of worldschooling

While there are many bonuses to worldschooling, of course there are a few negative ones as well.

For instance, if you take them out of school for long term travel then yes, they may miss their friends and a few birthday parties. They might even miss some memorable class moments however it’s highly likely their new travel memories will stick in their mind for the rest of their life rather than for the rest of the year.

The bonus of growing up today in the digital world is no matter how remote you travel, if you need to connect, your friends and family are likely just a quick call away.

If your kids are into a lot of extra curricular activities like sports or music, then yes, the new life paradigm will be an adjustment for everyone. The good news is that a lot of sports are universal and there’s always new sports to learn wherever you happen to be. Music is the same. Each country has their own music and learning about them has always been one of our children’s biggest travel draws.

The benefits of worldschooling

Yes, there might be a few things your kids might worry about when they leave the safety and comfort of their everyday lives, however, to us and our children at least, the benefits of long term travel outweigh all the negatives.

When kids travel, they will see and do things that stay with them for a lifetime. It’s also likely they will be more mindful of other cultures and ethnicities. They will witness for themselves both the hardships and the beauty that other people in the world experience. They will hopefully also realize that the biggest things holding them back from doing anything in life is themselves.

I only wish that more families and more kids could travel so that everyone had a bit of worldschooling. I truly think the world would be a better place if we could all walk in another cultures footsteps, if only for a while, and try to see the world from a global standpoint rather than only a regional one.

Are you dreaming of extended travel?

If you’re looking into educating your kids via worldschooling during an extended trip abroad, I wish you good luck with whatever decision you make and wherever you choose to make it.

If you go, know that there are tons of websites with useful information out there, as well as Facebook groups that will let you meet up with similar traveling families. We’ve made some great friends that way and there’s tons of valuable advice from other families on the move as well.

The greatest part about travel is that you can go or stay as long as you want. There are no rules. If you want to move to London, Bali or Rio for a year, you can make it happen. If you’re tired of travel, you can also settle down right where you are or stop someplace else. Your kids will adjust and most will thrive however, how you go about their education is up to you.

Long term travel with a family is about options, choice and change. If you think that’s a good thing to teach your kids then start packing your bags.

As long as you make education a priority, they will learn what they need to whether that’s at home in a regular school system, through e-learning or through homeschooling and, if your kids are learning anything while you travel, they’re worldschooling regardless.

In a few week’s time, our family is going to be on the road on an open ended adventure starting in Mexico and Belize and then jumping over to Southern Europe. Exactly how long we’ll be gone is up to debate, however it will probably be six months or longer. We’re tremendously looking forward to it and have a million and one ideas on things to do, places to see and people to visit.

After Mexico, we’re flying into Madrid, Spain and will slowly make our way along the Mediterranean to Portugal, Morocco, Italy, Greece and Turkey. From there we don’t have a clue where we’ll end up but that’s part of the excitement.

Not only is this trip going to provide many great travel tales for this site, but it’s also going to give us our first real opportunity to work in a location free environment. Up to this point we’ve merely dabbled with a virtual workplace and up until a few months ago were still taking regular contracts. Well, that life is officially over!

Now that we have a few websites under our belt and a somewhat steady income coming in, we feel that we’re truly ready to live a life of travel and adventure. Both of the kids are on board and Micki and I are both excited to set out and call the whole world our home.

Of course, this means that right now we’re insanely busy with getting everything set up and ready for our travels. In case you want to know what we have to deal with for a trip such as this, I’ve included a rough list of things we need to take care of. Some of you might be wondering what steps someone with a house, two cars, two kids, a cat and a house full of furniture need to take to make this trip a reality. For those of you interested, read on. The rest of you, look away because it isn’t pretty.

If you think that a life of travel and adventure is effortless, you might be shocked to realize that it takes a lot of work to live a life outside of the box. Of course, in our minds, the benefits far outweigh the costs. Here’s our list.

Give Notice:

• Give notice to our landlord that we’re moving out at the end of the month
• Cancel our gas, electricity, internet, cable and phone services
• Set up and meet with the remote online teacher who will be looking after our sons education while we travel
• Let the school and his teacher know our son is leaving the country
• Call our bank and credit card companies to let them know we’re going to be on the road
• Let healthcare know we’re going to be traveling
• Forward all our mail to a new address

Sell or Give Away to Charity:

• Sell one of our vehicles to limit our storage costs
• Sell our utility trailer, car top carrier and several bulky outdoor items that we don’t want to store
• Sell one set of couches (we have two sets), our kitchen table and chairs (too bulky), a spare bed and a few larger items that we don’t feel like leaving in storage
• Clear out various electronics that we’ve upgraded that still have some life in them
• Go through all our kids clothes and get rid of anything that is too small or will be if/when we return

Buy:

• Buy another laptop and a new travel router so we can both work remotely
• Buy new luggage and repair old ones for clothes storage (this trip we’ve decided to ditch the backpacks in favor of a nice rolling set!)
• Buy our tickets to Mexico and find a place to stay while we’re there
• Research travel insurance companies and decide on the best plan

To Do:

• Get all our taxes sorted out for next April (need all our receipts sorted and entered into a spreadsheet)
• Get eye and teeth exams for the kids before we leave
• Get International Drivers Licenses (since we hope to buy a car to tour Europe)
• Find and rent a large local storage locker for all our belongings
• Rent a U-Haul truck or hire movers to help put our stuff into storage
• Clean the house once all our things are out
• Figure out where to store our vehicle while we’re gone
• Drive eight hours to Calgary to visit friends and family and to drop off our cat Cozzie at Micki’s moms
• Board the plane and have a celebratory glass of wine to making our dreams happen!

There’s probably a thousand other small things that we’ll be doing as well, including going on a few small local adventures, replacing some more of our tech devices, buying a few things we’ll need for the road and getting this house and our things straightened out.

Most of it is mundane and I struggled with including it here, however I believe that sometimes you have to show both sides to living on the road. The truth is, sometimes you need to work hard to make it look like you’re hardly working.

If you can think of anything I missed on this list let me know and if you’re planning on taking an extended travel break in the near future I hope it sheds some light on what that involves.

Also, if you’re planning on leaving for an extended trip yourself, check out some of our older posts that discuss where to store your things when you travel, what to do with your pet when you’re on the road, tech we travel with, and finally how to get the most for your things on Kijiji and Craigslist.

If you’re hoping to work while you’re on the road, please check out Micki’s awesome list of 45 great jobs you can do while traveling the world for a bunch of useful ideas to get you started.

Safe travels!

Before we had children, countless friends and relatives told us to enjoy travel while we could, assuming we’d stop traveling when our kids arrived. But we persevered, and as a family, we’ve visited Cuba, Hong Kong, Hawaii, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Mexico, Canada, the Philippines and Costa Rica.

We’ve traveled through diapers, the terrible twos, toilet training and all the way to first grade.

After all that, I’m here to announce loud and clear:  It is possible to travel with children and have a wonderful time.

Why travel with kids is amazing

A deeper connection to the people and places you visit. Many cultures are child friendly and family focused. We found, especially in Mexico and the Philippines, that our children were warmly welcomed everywhere from restaurants to stores. Little old ladies gave them candies, and people walked up to us on the street to strike up a conversation. With kids, we were approachable. When we traveled alone, we were just tourists passing through.

Quality and quantity time with your family. Time together is one thing that’s missing from most of our daily lives. When you travel, you’ll share unique experiences that will bond your family. Sure, it can sometimes be a bit tough, but there are some moments so magical that you’ll never want to go back home. You’ll always have those special memories that bond your family together.

Kids slow you down. And yes, this is a good thing. As adults, we’re often tempted to try to see it all, and in doing so, we miss a lot. Having kids forces you to slow down and really enjoy where you are, and what you’re doing.

Kids help you grow. Kids constantly challenge your assumptions, and make you face some tough realities. Kids see so many things that parents miss. Ever tried explaining to a three year old why there’s a family sleeping on a cardboard sheet in front of a convenience store in the Philippines? I have, and it made me realize I hadn’t faced some ugly facts about poverty and inequality in a while.

You’re more prepared. Hitting the road with kids forces you to be more prepared. We now hit the road with a traveling pharmacy, stocked with a first aid kit, kids’ Tylenol, Gravol, Pepto Bismal, rehydration salts, cough drops, and on and on. Not only is it essential for the kiddos, but it’s sure nice to have the supplies for us adults.

Creature comforts. As single backpackers, Charles and I stayed in some truly skeevy hostels in the name of saving money. As a family, we want more space (and sanitation), so we’ve started renting houses and apartments for a month or so at at time. While this costs us a bit more money, it’s wonderful to stay in places that are roomier and cleaner. On top of this, we tend to eat better and more regularly with the kiddos around.

You might just become a better parent. Being on the road has forced us to rely less on toys and electronics for amusement. Instead, we’ve had to make our own toys as we go (not surprisingly, sticks and rocks are always a hit) and (the horror!) play with our kids.

Joy! Unlike most adults, kids wholeheartedly embrace the fun in life. Kids make you do goofy things that you never would have tried as an adult. It’s fun to let our hair down once in a while, and having kids is the perfect excuse. I’ve played on playgrounds across the world, thanks to my kids. When’s the last time you played on a swing?

You’ll give your kids some amazing gifts, too.

Life becomes an amazing field trip. Instead of learning about the world in textbooks and through lectures, they’ll be learning live and in person. The whole world will be their classroom, and you’ll be learning with them. We could have taught our kids about endangered leatherback turtles. Instead, they watched a leatherback lay her eggs and make her way back to the ocean. To this day, Cole talks about how people shouldn’t throw garbage into the ocean because it hurts the turtles. He never would have learned such a deep and lasting lesson in school.

The big picture. You’re giving your kids a great gift by letting them develop a perspective that the world extends beyond their own friends, family and neighborhood. Our kids know that children who speak a different language can make great playmates, and that the strange looking food can be surprisingly good!

You’ll open up a world of possibilities. Your children will see and try things they’ve never done before. Cole, then five, learned to boogie board and zip line Costa Rica. I’m not sure I’ll ever get a better gift than the look of accomplishment and pride in his eyes.

Far from being the terrible experience that we were warned about, traveling with our kids has been a wonderful way to explore our world.

What do you think about traveling with kids? Let us know – we’d love to hear from you!