Special Guest Edition: How We Homeschooled Today by Katherine Seat
Warning: may induce feelings of extreme envy.
I am very excited to share another guest edition of How We Homeschooled Today. This one really couldn’t be more different to the typical days I share from my own family in London! Katherine is an Australian living in Cambodia and writes on Substack at Chronically Cross-Cultural.
I’ve included links to previous guests posts at the bottom, and if you’d like to share your own homeschool day with me, please get in touch! All styles of home education welcome.
A little bit of maths and English each morning is my homeschool plan. We sit at the kitchen table in the morning. I’m often preparing our main meal around this time.
On the Monday in question, we abandoned the deskwork part of the day. The only part that looks like ‘school’.
We tuk-tuked out to the nearby jungle-and-temple-ruins park.
Why? We were sort of pushed out.
Deskwork was too hard to bother with as we couldn’t think straight at home. Mournful music and the sounds of monks chanting filled our house. Whenever there is a funeral or party in Cambodia, everyone knows about it thanks to the noise. It’s always so annoying.
When I complained to my husband, a local, he told me there were actually 3 funerals going on. He then began to explain who had died and how. No one close to us but via friends-of-a-friend type of relationship. A fall, a traffic accident and an unknown cause.
I got excited about all the different learning things we could do at the park/jungle/temples. Before we left I was looking up worksheets and trying to find information to print out.
Collect seedpods and learn about seed dispersal!
Walk around the 1000-year-old water hole and measure it on the exercise app!
And the history—oh the history! (Google Angkor Archeological Park and you’ll see what I mean.)
But in the end, I decided not to. We walked around Srah Srang, the man-made water hole, without worksheets. We all enjoyed and noticed different things. Master 10 commented that the steps looked like sponges. I wondered if he remembers learning about laterite. He watched Angkor YouTube documentaries during the pandemic.
Open sky, vast water, trees—this view energised Miss 8. “Very inspiring”, were her words.
They both noticed the steps were steep and there was green slime growing in the water.
We ate lunch in a restaurant near the water then off to explore Ta Prohm temple, aka Tomb Raider temple. We had fun running around in there dodging raindrops and tourists. (Apart from when the drizzle threatened to turn into a dangerous storm, that wasn’t so fun.)
That zapped most of the day’s energy, and the noise was still going when we got home. So we didn’t try any desk work. (So it’s not “a little bit of maths every day”, it’s more like “a little bit of maths”.)
Later that day/evening I read to them from two of the books we were reading. One was historical fiction set in America in the 1700s (The American Victory). The other is set in the ‘The Outback’ in the 1980s. An Australian Christian storybook crawling with bush animals (Spindles by Barry Chant).
Reading aloud is a big part of life for us. Someone has already put together the words, so for me as a homeschool mum it is like a zero prep lesson. We all enjoy it and learn so much. I could file that time under English, History, Bible, Science, and Geography. Something about stories we can all connect with. It is more of an experience than an info dump.
Without a library or an easy way to buy English books, we get them from friends. When others leave Cambodia they can’t take all their books with them. Sad for them, happy for us.
A haphazard day that I didn’t plan.
But when I looked back on it that evening, it actually seemed like the kind of day I would like to prepare. I would call it ‘A Visit to Three Countries’. The temples are a symbol of Cambodia. Angkor Wat actually appears on the flag. A reminder of the nation’s glorious history. So we spent the first part of the day enjoying Cambodia. Then later, the two books transported us to America and Australia.
If you’re a new sign-up, you might like to have a look at some previous special guest editions:
Renee’s account of a homeschool day with her son, who has autism.
Mary-Ann Horley’s account of home education at home and on holiday.
Allyse Hopkins’ very relatable day with her family of four in New Zealand.
Susie Wales’ life with her three boys in Florida.
Rachael Ringenberg’s thoughtful glimpse into her life with four girls in Vermont.
Joel Bowman’s ‘away schooling’, travelling around the classical world with an eight year old.
If you’d like to be next, leave a comment or send me an e-mail.
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