Homeschooling, or better: WORLDschooling!

One of my major concerns, when we started planning this trip, was to make sure our kids kept up with their schooling and would continue being good students and keep their eagerness to learn. I started reading about the possible options (ie. homeschooling, onlineschooling, unschooling, etc) Luckily there was an overwhelming amount of resources and information available: We met with teachers and mentors, ordered leaflets, joined online communities, read article after article and became well informed about our options.

I debated in lugging around books, which was not an option with our limited luggage choice. I considered planning out exactly every day of our schooling, which would become difficult to stick to with our travel days, all day outings or reliable internet source. I debated some online schools/classes, which were mostly requiring the kids to be online for specific times of the day, which was also not an option as we would be in different time zones. At the end we settled for the following:

Kaio (starting middle school, 6th grade): we were fortunate that our school district, Boulder Valley School District, offers an online program, Boulder Universal. BU is online and fairly flexible by allowing the student to work at their own pace with bi-weekly deadlines. We signed him up for math and science. For the other subjects, such as language arts, history, etc we are using Kahn Academy, Duolingo and education.com
Josefine (starting 4th grade): unfortunately the elementary version of the Boulder Valley School District ‘online schooling’ is still mainly book based and we weren’t planning to drag the books with us (which they admitted, was a substantial amount!). So we are doing a mixture of Kahn Academy, education.com, Duolingo and other useful websites.
Madeline (preK): We are using mainly education.com, Kahn Academy Kids app and other educational apps and lot’s of arts and crafts, drawing, teaching letters and numbers…

For the 2 older kids we have created individual Trello lists, which allows us to plan for the week (we define what they have to accomplish and include links or page numbers of what they need to read, finish worksheets, etc) and also track their studies. Both Education.com (we purchased the 1 year subscription) and Kahn Academy have personalized dashboards for each kid and allow us to check on their progress.

For example: Josefine needs to do 1 hour each of Math, Science or Geography, Language & Arts and History every day. Depending on our schedule, she might do 2 hours of science in one day and the following day not do any, as long as she has 5 hours of each subject at the end of the week, even if this means working on weekends to catch up. This past week her schooling was as following:

Science: she read several articles on nutrition and had to make a 1 page summary about the facts she learned. We reviewed this together and I asked questions to ensure she comprehended the articles.
History: as we are in Istanbul, which is full of culture and history, Josefine read predefined and age-appropriate articles and watched related videos on Kahn academy about the area and history. It was very helpful to have her compliment and explain certain places we visited. (with her input and Kaio’s knowledge we had our personal guides!).
Language Arts: Josefine continued her French studies on Duolingo. (Kaio chose Dutch), reading nonfiction, working on a blog post (this includes the planning of the subject, writing, working with one of us on the editing and including pictures) and typing lessons.
Math: she followed her lesson plan on Kahn Academy.

We have just finished our first 4 weeks of schooling and I feel we are getting into a good schedule and the kids are responding very well!