Cruising with Kids

Our kids are good travelers. They may say that they’d rather just stay home when we propose a new trip, but once the time comes they are raring to go. Devin, the 10-year-old, gets especially fired up and is always pushing to leave at oh-dark-thirty to get a jump on the trip. Speaking of which, one of our family tenets is to get going early to beat the crowds. I’m sure that idea will pop up multiple times during this trip.

So they are good travelers. But this is no ordinary trip. They will be away from home, their friends, and their extended family for half a year, which is a very long time in a child’s world. They will also be out of school for half a school year, so we will need to compensate for that. I mentioned already that doing remote learning simply won’t work when we’re on the other side of the planet. So we are going to “home school” them. This is something that only really works for us in this one time period. Thomas will miss the back end of 7th grade and DJ (Devin) will miss the back end of 5th. We can handle the schooling at this level. Once high school starts it becomes much more treacherous (am I really going to try and teach AP Calculus?). We didn’t want to wait another year because that would have meant DJ missing his final trimester at his elementary school, where he has been enrolled since TK. We don’t want him to miss that. So 2025 is it.

We decided early on that we’d get two cabins. That adds considerably to the expense, of course, but we want to use the interior cabin as the “schoolhouse.” Having a separate place to go and do school work will hopefully create a sense of focus and purpose. Plus having a second cabin means twice the closet space, an extra bathroom, and more spacious sleeping arrangements. You never know exactly how everything will play out until you establish a rhythm, but we’re hoping this arrangement proves flexible.

Since we were planning this trip as Thomas went through fifth grade, we were able to keep all of the assignments and work, which aided greatly in managing the plan for DJ. Seventh grade is a bit more of an unknown, but we have already talked to the junior high principal about our trip. She was super supportive and offered a lot of help, like providing copies of books and materials ahead of time.

As an aside, we’ve encountered a lot of supportive people along the way, actually. “Are you nuts?” is a perfectly reasonable response to being told that we are spending six months on a boat with two kids. But most people we’ve talked to are super positive, which is great.

Back to the schooling – Liz taught AP British Lit to high school students for years, so she will handle the ELA (English and language arts) side of things. I’ll handle math and science and we’ll split social studies. For the latter we’ll ensure that the standard grade-level requirements are covered, but I am also working up a country journal that we’ll fill out as we travel. For each new country, each boy will research basic facts about the country and fill in a page in the journal. Things like whether the country is independent or a territory, if independent then how did that come about and when (many of our stops will be in places that were once part of some empire or another, so colonialism and its effects will be a through line of the social studies program), what type of government is in place, who heads the government, type of money used, and primary language spoken, plus how to say hello, please, and thank you.

As far as staying entertained on the ship, DJ is a voracious reader and can easily find refuge in a book. Thomas is not a big reader. We’ve assigned him the task of running a video blog for the trip. We’re hopeful this can help him keep in touch with his friends back home as well as providing a record of the experience. I fully expect them to be the only kids on the ship, so they’re going to have to rely on each other a lot. There’s going to be friction at times, but we’ll muddle through as we always do.Meer informatie