How Does School Work… Is ‘Boatschool’ A Thing?
Yeah, I think ‘boatschool’ is a thing! Mainly because I do it! So that question: how does school work… there are so many answers people would give when you asked them that question so here’s my answer!
First up I think I should mention that I went to Kinder Garden when I was four but actually have never been to school! Some of you may think that’s crazy, but it’s true! So now, several years into homeschooling later, it’s all I know, and so I don’t have anything to compare it to…
Now here is a quick run through of the average school day on board Happy Days. First up in the schedule is online maths, everyone has a device and go off and do it for at the very least an hour, if not more.
At the end of that hour everyone meets at the table with books and pencils. Mum then reads a few paragraphs on the subject of the day… as an example we recently did a topic study on Asia and so each day we would learn about a new country, it’s culture, flag, animals, history, etc. Once she’s read through her bit we get into our books – each a different level for our different ages – and write down what we learned, answer questions and do additional research. There are probably around 5 pages per lesson so it takes us all up about a solid two hours.
Then it’s on to each persons project be it music, photography, editing, or making muffins! Whatever is our peak of interest that day…
And there you have it. I know a lot of you might be thinking we’re mad right about now, I promise, we’re not! Just we do it differently and instead of sitting in a classroom we are out here learning everyday and our ‘school work’ just covers the basics. So here’s some of the rest of the things we learn everyday just by living this lifestyle:
The local language of wherever we are, this is necessary of course as whenever we want to go on land it’s inevitable that we meet someone new and have to at least say hi! Then there’s the culture, like, for example, we are currently in Indonesia and it would be pretty disrespectful to go in to land in just a bikini, so we cover up and make sure we are respecting their culture.
There’s also power consumption, we have a solar set-up onboard which means we are never plugged into anything, we are totally self-sufficient. But this also means that we mostly depend on the sun to make sure all our electrics work like fans, chargers, lights, and toilets. Of course we have a generator for back up but we mostly use power from the sun!
We are all learning things like plumbing when a toilet or sink get blocked, or mechanical stuff when the engines won’t turn on or are over-heating.
There’s cooking that we all do, everyone has their own job when dinner time comes around, then there’s weather routing – planning when to leave and what the wind is doing, where we can anchor, when the surf or kiting will be good and whether or not we will be okay in a squall that may hit us – this is definitely a big thing that everyone can learn more about, each person onboard gets to help decide where we’re going next, but the decision always depends on the weather, so it’s best we know something about it!
I’ll stop here so as not to bore you with all the unique things we get to learn by living this lifestyle, we love it and have learnt so many things already! So don’t worry about how much actual ‘school work’ we do, it’s just covering the basics, and we gain so much knowledge by just embracing where we are and what’s around us.
There’s how ‘boatschool’ works for me and my family out here! Have questions? Comment below!