schooling for travelling children

We are looking at embarking on an extensive world trip with two of our children who will be aged 9 %26amp; 13.

We would like to investigate the possibility of settling in one spot for a few months with the children possibly attending a local school and England seems a likely spot as there wont be(much) of a language barrier.

Does anyone know of anyone who has done this or has anyone done it themselve ? France,Italy or Greece may be options too.

Much obliged.

|||

Well, I have not done it, but, if your children speak no Greek, French or Italian at all then you may be putting them behind, as opposed to continuing on a correspondence course that you will likely take with you. Now, that said, I don%26#39;t consider this a big deal for your younger child, but, your older child is entering high school years and the grades are more important, and falling six months behind then returning home and having to start behind may be difficult unless your child is a good student.

I do think that travel is a great education though, and I think it is a great idea to take the year, and another option is to continue with the correspondence and then use the two months most kids get off school and stick your child in a foriegn school then, NOT, expecting much academic acomplishment, but to learn some langauge and have a great socail contact opportunity with other kids.

My mother put my sister in a French school for two years while we lived in France, I was a baby, but my sister was 8-10. She did get %26quot;put back%26quot; but, was smart and caught up in her second year as she then had the language, but , I think you are only talking about a few months right?

|||

Probably not practical in your case but I%26#39;ll throw this out anyway. I once knew a kid my age (17 at the time) who was traveling around the world with his parents and sister on a sailboat. The parents put an ad in a university newspaper offering a %26quot;see the world%26quot; offer to graduating teachers, in other words, come travel with us and teach our kids in return for free room and board. They had lots of responses and picked a grad student. Not only did they keep the children up to speed educationally, they also got an aupair/babysitter out of the deal which allowed the adults time away from the kids every once in awhile.

|||

-:- Message from TripAdvisor staff -:-

This topic was inactive for 6 months and has been closed to new posts. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one.

To review the TripAdvisor Forums Posting Guidelines, please follow this link: http://www.tripadvisor.com/pages/forums_posting_guidelines.html

We remove posts that do not follow our posting guidelines, and we reserve the right to remove any post for any reason.

Removed on: 10:17 pm, September 18, 2009