How we homeschool while moving to America

Please share all your travelling/moving tips!

You haven’t had a post from How We Homeschool for a couple of months. Partly this is because I haven’t felt I had anything much to tell you, in which I think I’m not alone—many of my favourite Substackers have gone very quiet recently. I miss them!

But partly it’s because for the past couple of months my family has been on the cusp of moving house—moving with a capital M. My husband has been offered a two year fellowship at the Mercatus Center in Arlington, Virginia. (You can read all about it here if you like.) So we’ve been very busy getting rid of vast quantities of stuff, storing yet more vast quantities with our very kind parents, moving out of our flat, sorting out visas, housesitting for lovely friends, and wondering how we still seem to have an enormous amount to take with us as we fly from the UK to the US.

Suffice to say, I now want to go full minimalist, and make it my business to move house as few times as possible for the rest of my life.

(Except I don’t, really. The house we’re staying in at the moment is the opposite of minimalist and I absolutely love it. Stuff means memories, especially for women like me whose memory seems to get worse and worse. I truly don’t believe that taking a photo of something precious on your phone and then chucking the precious thing out gives you the same result as just owning the item itself. But I digress.)

How have we homeschooled over the past few weeks? Barely at all! To begin with I insisted on handwriting and spelling each morning, but even that quickly became too much. I was delighted to find though that while I largely ignored the children I would sometimes find them curled up reading one of their French books (from One Third Stories, or the I Can Read French series), or a history book, or doing something else educational which I’ve now forgotten but which reassured me that their brains were not ossifying while I practised some benign neglect. And anyway it’s summer, and we will pick things up again once we’ve settled into our new home—and the Smithsonian museums will be right on our doorstep and really, what more of an education does a person need than that?

(Where will our new home be? We don’t know yet. Apparently in America it’s quick and easy to rent somewhere when you arrive. Which I mostly feel fine about but which occasionally keeps me up in the middle of the night worrying about hotel bills spiralling ever upwards while we chase apartments that someone else always gets to first. Excuse me for a moment while I breathe into this paper bag…)

Tell me everything you know about travelling and moving with children

We have never travelled abroad with the children before. They’ve never been on a plane. They have no memory of ever moving house. So I would love it if all you frequent fliers and worldschoolers and people who have to move a lot for work would tell me your best advice for how to make the next few weeks as easy as possible. No tip is too small—I can’t even work out what headphones to buy for the flight. Assume I know nothing! Hopefully this will be helpful for lots of other readers too.

And if I’ve hit the jackpot and someone reading this happens to homeschool in or near Arlington, VA, please tell me anything and everything you think I should know.

I hope that normal service here will resume once we’re settled, although from my current vantage point that seems a distant prospect! In the meantime, you might like to take a look at the series of guest posts from readers, sharing what their own homeschooling days look like. You can find them all here.

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