We are a family of seven living in France for the year.

We are homeschooling three of our five boys (ages 7,10, and 13) and wrangling / distracting the other two (8 months and 3 yrs).

 

This will be our 6th year homeschooling (!), our 2nd year of teaching three grades at a time, and our 1st of trying to keep it all afloat with a toddler and a newborn.

We have also decided to throw another wrench in the works and move abroad for the year.

 

 

Because this is a year of travel, we’ve had to approach our school year a bit differently. We’ve got a lot of different ages, a lot of different learning styles, and a variety of different restrictions.

 

 

Also, homeschool has always seemed to take a lot of stuff. Up until now, we have spent a handful of years acquiring all of the physical pieces that make up a “home classroom”. We have culled, edited, tossed, and established exactly what we have found to be “essential” as far as homeschool gear. At least for grades pre-K-7. As a teacher you lean on things like maps, “living books”, flash cards, a printer, and staplers, and tape, and rulers for goodness sakes. Despite however many ways I try to thin it down, we still have four students and so… stuff.

 

 

Our main restriction is space. There are a lot of us and we will need to travel light. Add in homeschool and all of its required books, globes, notebooks, whiteboards (it’s just so
much), and we are fighting an uphill battle on “limited luggage.”

And so we are having to make every detail count as far as school and time and all the things:

Every book that can be “Kindled”, will be.

Every assignment that can be lightweight, oral, or memorized,…applause!

And every experience that can serve as many purposes, ages, appetites, and disciplines as possible…Result!

This has not been our approach before this year and who knows how we will commence once we return home. But for now, in this year, this is how it’s happening.

 

 

A little backstory on “Living Skool” and “Living Books”

If you are here and you are an educator you most likely know about Charlotte Mason and her idea of “living books”. If you don’t, let me introduce you…

 

Charlotte Mason was a much-beloved British, educational innovator (1842-1923). She was one of the first people to champion the education of the “whole child” and when describing the role of the teacher in relationship to the curriculum or materials chosen for their students,  she said this:

“Our business is to give the child mind-stuff, and both quality and quantity are essential.”

I am interested in “mind-stuff”. In fact, that might be exactly what I am most interested in.

 

 

What are “Living Books?”

Miss Mason described living books as “whole books,” or “books that display imagination, originality, and the ‘human touch.” These aren’t just any books. These are the goooood books — the kind of books that  are not only special in their content and approach but are generative in their effect on the reader. These books can be counted on, returned to, adored by children, and leaned on by teachers and parents to act like “seeds” or “lit coals” in the minds that read them.

 

 

In the months of planning leading up to this year, I was on the phone with a dear friend of mine and I was kind of freaking out. I was about one month away from having our fifth baby and knew that, although the year ahead would be a great adventure for our family, there were about a squillion homeschool hurdles I would have to face upon landing ourselves on the other side of the Atlantic. We would have a newborn, we would have a toddler, I would have three grades to teach and no outside community, at least in the very beginning.

 

 

How would we keep up? What should we take and what would I not be able to teach without?

I needed a map but there wasn’t one.

I needed to make the map but I didn’t even know where to start.

Did I mention that I was nine months pregnant?

My patient and loving friend listened to me freak out and then made a suggestion that truly flipped the cards for me.

She said, “What if you just claimed this year for what it is and took it all as a “living school”? Do your math and your language, read a ton of books together, and then just mark then rest of everything in your mental planner as “EUROPE”.

 

 

I think I stuttered out some form of “What?! You can dothat?”

But what I really meant was, “Can I do that?”

I took this conversation back to Skip and we spent the next month of nights wondering:

 

 

Could we create a “Living” School within our family for the next year?

Could we encourage our children’s natural inclination to learn in any environment?

Could we make educational experiences transcend school?

Could we inspire curiosity, the desire to dig deeper, and also establish a habit of wonder and interest?

 

 

Back to Living Books and lit coals in the minds of our children…

What if we could create “lit coals” in the minds of our children through carefully, curated experiences in addition to books? What if the word “school” didn’t have to strike dread into the minds of our children? What if we could knock the walls down and make the world we were travelling through, in every inch, our classroom? After all, luggage restrictions left us with basically a few choice books, a shoddy internet connection, and a map…

And so we started making a list..

We made a list of the names that had struck the hearts of our family already: painters, scientists, saints, poets, chefs, moments in history…

 

And we unfolded our maps…

We didn’t have a set of encyclopedias or buckets full of math manipulatives but we did have an armful of destinations within an hour’s drive and a van that fit us all in it.

 

Photo to be restored

 

We had year of school, but more importantly we had Living School.