Getting ready for my child's remote learning experience

Why have I been thinking of distance learning as an alternative to my child’s schooling education ?

Simply because I’m planning to travel and live abroad with my daughter. 

I have got some experience of living abroad, but this time I would be living this new experience with my daughter who will be at the elementary school age when we start our trip. This is why I had to think about alternatives for my child’s school education.

The time to pack our bags is not close and not even the one for booking flights. Many things remain to be done and one of them is learning about how I could assist my daughter with school subjects during the trip and the stay abroad. 

She cannot be schooled in a local school till we find a place to settle in. My daughter will not go to international schools either. The fee for these schools doesn’t fit my budget. If we are to settle in a place, she could be enrolled in a local school.

There are many children instruction approaches out there, schooling in a classroom, unschooling, homeschooling, worldschooling, home education, distance learning... etc. For each child there might be a different method and even several ones as the child’s needs and circumstances evolve. 

I must precise that I’m not an advocate of any particular way of teaching children. I merely think we  should have the choice of the kind of education we may feel is the most suitable for us or our children at all stages of life and for all circumstances and the choice to easily change option as well. 

As far as I’m concerned, the option I intend to choose for my daughter while we will be traveling is a distance learning course. 

I contemplate this alternative mainly for the support it offers in providing school education. The course will allow me to not become a full time school teacher for my child. I admit I hope half of the job would be done by this support as I’ve also got my work to do. Of course, I know that even with an online course as a support I will need to assist my daughter much more compared to what I do when she has a teacher at school to explain the directives and bases of lessons to her. Still, the support of the distance course is reassuring.

It is also an opportunity to bring schooling into our life. One of the difficulties of learning at school for me was that most of the time what I was taught was not applied in my life and my environment. I feel that the demarcation we place between what we teach to our children at home as parent and what school teachers instruct them is a sign of schooling being badly adapted to children’s lives. By knowing better what is taught in the lessons, I hope to be able to address this matter making up exercises connected to our life, visiting places linked to courses, talking in foreign languages with others... As she is keen on photography and drawing she could also keep on practicing these activities and use them to illustrate her own notebook of memories for example and by doing so practice skills such as writing and picture. By devising such tools for learning, I hope to bring school with us all along the way.

At the same time, the journey abroad and with a remote course could be a chance for my daughter to learn at her own pace and led by her interests. A distance course allows for taking more time in subjects or on the contrary going over some faster if the child happens to be a quick learner in particular ones.

French is my daughter’s native language, so I intend for my daughter to pursue a French base curriculum distance course.There are a few courses based on the French curriculum. Personally, I might choose the course from the CNED, basically the French national institute in distance learning. The course for an elementary school child is accessible online. It doesn’t seem to contain many interactive activities though, but lessons, exercises and few feedback. So in order to make the lessons more appealing, cultural visits and activities I would have to design myself are necessary. 

The other course I thought about for a while was with the EIB à distance, but it seems it doesn’t provide their courses online, only in paper books and notebooks sent at home. This option is not practical while traveling. You can look up at some other choices of French based remote courses on the site of a group of distance learning school, though I didn’t find them neither engaging enough nor affordable for me. If you're looking for a French language based distance course, do not forget to check the remote school from Québec or any other French speaking countries for that matter. It’s a distance course after all.

In the future, I could choose a course with an English based curriculum or in any other language my daughter, and I, would have learned well enough along the way. There are plenty of choices of online courses for children to cater the needs of any family and following various countries curriculum.

With the selected course, my daughter wouldn’t be in a school, but would follow a curriculum through an asynchronised online distance course. And this is an other reason to choose the remote course during the trip as opposed to unschooling which is often a curriculum and assessment free method of learning. I feel that pursuing a curriculum makes it easier to slot back to a local school when we would settle long enough in a place abroad, or back at home, without the hassle of level tests and curriculum adjustment. 

In our case it is not compulsory for the curriculum to be regulated since we are going out of France, our country of residence. The rules about remote learners of school age do not apply to those leaving the French territory. However, it is important to take into account that when staying in a country for more than three months, the education of a child should follow the rules of the country where you are staying. Everyone should then be informed about the laws of the country where they choose to stay about unschooling or remote schooling. Some countries do not allow these alternatives, thus it is important to check the status of the countries where you wish to remotely school your child during a long stay. 

Have I got any concerns about this project?

I have got so many of them. However I prefer to think about solutions we could find for them now or during our journey. 

An issue people often bring up is the socialization of children pursuing a distance learning course. I'm not particularly worried about it since there are children everywhere in the world. Plus, children will not be the only people my daughter will socialize with. There are lots to learn from everyone. 

An other one is 'what if the child doesn't understand a lesson?' For that one, I definitely count on the magic of the Internet to research what we don’t know about and can’t find answer beside us. Actually, one of the first thing I looked up when I began to think about this trip was online maths lessons sites because it’s my dreaded subject. Then I remembered it will be elementary maths. I should be alright, shouldn’t I. Still, in addition to the remote course, it’s great to know there are lots of options online and also that school subjects lessons can be taken in many places from a local tutor if needed. Being a remote learner does not mean being adverse to in person class or meeting people. 

As for now this is where my preparation for the new adventure of remote learning for my daughter has led me. We are getting ready for a journey of learning be it remotely or through our travel experience.

Going abroad, traveling in a foreign country means putting oneself in a position from which we can more easily open our heart and brain towards learning from others, from the different scenery we see, from various cultures, from ourselves and putting ourselves in situations where we have to find solutions. We tend to become more adventurous, eager to discover and try new things and ask questions about and to others. There will be lots to discover and learn, included a new schooling way.

The distance course should allow my daughter to keep learning through a school curriculum. I would probably not have got into such a journey if there wasn’t any support to teach her school subjects while traveling abroad. 

Now, I like imagining the world as her classroom. 

Catherine