Our Big Worldschooling Adventure

In about four weeks we set off on a bold new adventure to see what the world can teach us.

After Miss M completes the equivalent of first grade at the end of June, we’re going to embark on what we’re grandly calling World School. It will be a year of traveling and learning, of staying with friends and working in exchange for accommodation.

The first worldschooling session will take Miss M and I to Cambodia, where we will volunteer at a seahorse protection project. We’re going to be there for several weeks, and we will both miss Darling Man and the baby terribly.

Darling Man will stay home most of the time, keeping our street food tour business running in Ho Chi Minh City. Depending on the visa gods, he may join us in France for a few weeks. (Remember last time we tried to go to France as a family, he was refused a visa?)

It was a very sudden decision to drop everything and take the kids traveling for a year. But once the prospect was raised, I could only think of reasons to go now, rather than not to go.

This blog, our tour business and my former career working for multinationals has given me friends all over the world. I’m hoping to visit a lot of them on our big adventure. Most have already been contacted with a very strange request: what can you teach us?

So far we’ve been promised a meeting with a French CSI-type gun expert and a cartoonist. We’ve been watching nature documentaries to prepare for our marine biology lessons in Cambodia and I’ve signed up for a maths app.

Miss M’s list of World School goals is quite short. She wants to learn about papermaking, acrobatics, making wine with her feet, maths and Bollywood dancing. I want her to maintain her French language skills and improve her reading (so I don’t have to supervise when she uses online learning resources). Sunny will just soak things up along the way, as two-year-olds are programmed to do.

As for me, I want to learn EVERYTHING, including how to be a better parent.

The big question is whether Miss M will keep up with her classmates, who will be at regular school while we travel.

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By: Barbara

A career girl who dropped out, traveled, found love, and never got around to going home again. Now wrangling a cross-cultural relationship and two third culture kids.