Setting sail for Homeschooling on a Boat

In the past weeks, we have been preparing for our most important task for the next two years; Homeschooling on a boat, or like some folks say, Boatschooling.

The first week of the school year has just past. Elliott is going to take 9th grade on the boat, and thus finish his primary school education. Victor will study both 6th and 7th grade.

Well prepared

Before we left from Denmark, we had made arrangements with the kids’ school that we could keep our Uni-logins. They provide a digital access for school materials and communication with the school. That way we would have access to curriculum, online books, all the reading plans and contact with their teachers. Then we would just log in and follow the lessons on the boat. We got a couple of math books and a single spelling book from the school, and that was it. The rest was online, so we didn’t have to prepare anything further.

Unexpected hurdles with Uni-Login

Unfortunately, it turned out that once we moved, the Uni-logins were removed. The thing is, in Denmark you have to declare departure from the country if you are away for more than 6 months. Then your social number gets locked and public accesses like uni-login are closed. Sigh! We would have liked to have known that before we left.

Now, Martin has been calling to the school, the Ministry of Education, the municipality and what feels like the entire bureaucracy in Denmark to get our uni-login accesses reinstated. So far without success.

We have one last hope with the municipality, from whom we are currently waiting for a response. So we are keeping our fingers crossed. Otherwise, we need to buy books in a hurry. They probably won’t deliver to Spain, so once again we’ll have to burden my sister in Denmark with getting the books sent to her and getting her to send it on to us. We’ve done that with a few too many things already. Well, I probably shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Of course the municipality will help us get our uni-login reinstated.

Getting started on the different School Subjects

The first week of teaching has gone with a bit of last minute home-made school materials.

Math

Luckily we had the math books to start with. Elliott learned about distances and angles with Pythagoras and sine and cosine. Although I think I had a handle on it once, I needed a refresh on that one. Martin also got carried away, with math being his strong side in school, and taught about the unit circle with a little help from a youtube video with an animation of the unit circle’s relationship to cosine and sine waves. Victor learned about fractions and percentages. Phew,  that I’ve got a hang of. He actually had a handle on it, too. He ended up doing an entire homework set designed for 7th-9th graders with virtually no errors.

English

In English the kids took turns reading Pinocchio to each other and writing summaries separately. I then had to read the chapters as well in order to correct the kids’ writings. It’s actually a pretty good book. Strange that I haven’t read it before.

Danish

Danish, for Elliott, turned into assignments in the spelling bee(Danish:Stavevejen). Some of the exercises were quite difficult. When I was in school, there was no such thing as an accompanying sentence(danish:ledsætning). Or was there? Maybe I just haven’t been that diligent. 

Victor was given some comma spelling exercises that I found online. Wow, there are a lot of rules for commas. He gave in after rule number 4 and have the last three rules to go. We’re gonna save that for next week. We also need to practice some more verbs and nouns. Fortunately, it’s the same as when I was at school.

A good start of Homeschooling despite some Hurdles

All in all, the first week on homeschooling on the boat went well. We were juggling with the many projects we have going on at the boat, and have been living in the yard for the most of the week. Martin has gotten his share of frustration with the yard, where they talk very little English and their manana mentality is very outspoken. 

Friday we had to take the day off schooling, because we had to leave the yard early in the morning and sail back to the marina. When we arrived at the marina, we were all so tired and couldn’t handle teaching or learning. Instead we did some Saturday schooling with some protest from Victor, but it worked out anyway.

Antons Gap Year without Homeschooling

Anton has a gap year after high school(gymnasium), which he finished by getting the highest grade possible in physics.

He is planning to study physics at the University of Copenhagen, when he returns home. Over social media, he can see his friends starting university, and is already a little homesick for student life. For a few days, he investigated the possibility of becoming a self-student and studying some physics online here on the boat.

One thing you can say about Anton; he doesn’t get bored for very long, before he comes up with something new. Now he has started to make a website, which will be coded in Python and linked to a SQL database.

At the same time, he installed an Arch Linux on the computer, which apparently failed a few times at first. At one point we heard a “Yes, it works”. Later that day he got a lot of errors again. It goes back and forth.
A lot of the time he has been playing Minecraft with Victor, and taking him out to buy coca cola. So nice to see that they enjoy each others company so much.

Up next

Coming up, some travel notes on the city of Cartagena Spain.