The Floating Classroom

Taking homeschooling to the high seas.

- Kate Laird

If you’re planning to set sail for a year with your kids, you have one narrow goal—to keep up so your children will be able to rejoin their friends when they return. For kids in kindergarten to eighth grade, this usually means studying math, a bit of writing, a lot of free reading and they’ll be fine. If your kids are in high school, you can either try to do a full year, which means you may have to cut down your cruising plans, or do the minimum school and have your children graduate a year late. Either can work fine, but it will need to be your teenager’s choice.

Are you heading out indefinitely? If so, your role becomes much more important, but also offers more flexibility. You can have “school” 365 days a year with only a few subjects at a time, or you can have six months completely off, and six months of full-on study. You can buy a stand-alone math program and boat school the rest, or you can buy a complete “all-in-one” curriculum from companies such as Calvert (calverteducation.com) or Oak Meadow (oakmeadow.com) and have the children work through it. Or, if none of those options pique your interest, you can create all of your own programs.

Over the past 12 years of homeschooling our daughters, Anna and Helen, from preschool through high school, there has been a constant useful tension between academics and experiences. (It probably helps to have one parent emphasizing academics and the other adventure.) In some years, this has looked like three or four hours of school every day. Other years, this has looked like six months of eight hours of school a day, and six months with the occasional math lesson.