Starting School - St. John's, Newfoundland
by Kate and Hamish Laird

	Helen at her desk (foreground) and Anna at hers in their cabin. Both desks fold up and barrel bolt against the bulkhead when not in use.

• Planned route this summer: Maine, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Greenland, Scotland
• On board: Kate and Hamish Laird, their children, Helen (4) and Anna (3), Jason Fitschen, and up to three guests on each leg of the voyage.

When we set off last Christmas aboard Seal, we felt the family timing couldn't be better, the girls were both out of nappies and not yet in school. A few families we met along the way said things like, "Oh, you're so lucky," and it turned out what they were talking about was school, not diapers.

I decided to start Helen's kindergarten while we were home on our refit in May in order to have a consistent month-long session with no interruptions of overnight sailing trips. Originally, I'd imagined that we would cancel school when we had clients on board, but keep it up during passages. However, at the moment all our passages have been too short to become fully used to the routine. It also turns out that having school with clients aboard punctuates the day and hasn't been a problem in the few weeks we've been doing it.

I decided against doing a set program like Calvert because I like teaching, and I figured I could tailor the program to where we were and what we were doing if I made up my own syllabus. Programs like that (especially when you can purchase the option of sending off your child's work to be corrected and graded) take a lot of the pressure off, but it didn't suit me. I taught the Calvert system on a boat 15 years ago, and I didn't like the time delay between writing essays and exams and receiving the results. It was also difficult to adapt to where we were. Of course, one could throw out various sections, and substitute local culture, but the program is not cheap, so I couldn't throw out sections lightly. Calvert is a good program, and we might do it in the future, but for now, it didn't make sense.

A great resource is Home Learning Year by Year: How to Design a Homeschool Curriculum from Preschool through High School by Rebecca Rupp (Three Rivers Press, 2000). She describes the standard expectations for each grade in the US system, and suggests resources and textbooks to help match those standards.

Helen's first interest was writing letters. For the past year or so, I've had a few of the WalMart workbooks kicking around, but we didn't make any progress. She's recognized all the letters for years (much earlier than Anna did, which shows what happens to parenting when one starts building a boat), but it turns out, there are tricks to learning how to write the letters. Rupp suggested the Handwriting Without Tears program. I looked at the website (http://www.hwtears.com), and looked at the price tag, and considered forging on with our WalMart books, but I thought an official 'school book' would please Helen and make her feel like school was something different and important. By the first day (F and E) of "Letters and Numbers for Me", I was completely sold on the program. The letters are grouped by how they are formed and have appealing, easy-to-remember names (Frog Jump Capitals, Magic C's etc.). Helen forgave all my previous incompetent lessons, and has raced through the workbook with two letters a day, and suddenly she can write.

Anna of course wanted to start school too. She's only three, and I don't believe in sit-down school for three-year-olds, but here I am teaching it. Fortunately we were still at home so I ordered the preschool version of Get Set For School. With four-year-old Helen, I am quite precise about what she's expected to do: two letters per day, following the workbook order, but Anna delves through the book at will, coloring in whatever she feels like doing.

The teachers' guides are good but not vital, although the kindergarten and grades 1 & 2 books have some very good tips on helping students with various difficulties, and easy ways to correctly grip the pencil.

We made what was supposed to be a wooden letter set out of construction paper - it only has to last through Anna, not years of kindergarten classes. I did get the Get Ready for School CD, which they adore. At home, I played it every day first thing to get them into school mode; on the boat we generally don't play it as much, due to the confined space, but we often play different songs at the beginning and end of class. The Pre-K Teachers Guide has suggestions on how to use the songs, which is helpful but not crucial. We also have another copy of Letters and Numbers for Me for Anna when she's ready, and a couple copies of the Grade 1 book (My Printing Book) and Grade 2 (Printing Power). It wasn't cheap to buy all the books at once, but I wanted to get them while we still had a home address so that we wouldn't run out mid-voyage, as it's difficult to predict how hard either child will want to work.

For math, on the other hand, I knew I'd need a workbook. But which one? With the homeschooling market and the Internet, it's a million times easier to design a curriculum than it was 15 years ago, but there's almost too many choices. Rupp recommended three programs. I looked over their websites, read reviews, and eventually decided on the Miquon Math Lab program (http://www.keypress.com). This program has work sheets in six workbooks (grades 1-3). I bought the complete set for Helen and Grade 1 for Anna, along with two sets of "Cuisenaire Rods" (we call them Math Sticks) to go with the workbooks.

At first, I just gave them the set of Math Sticks to play with (but only during school and only at anchor, so they wouldn't wind up scattered around the boat). Helen builds barges and freight wharves, Anna builds barges and doghouses. Now Helen has begun the first workbook, and Anna either plays with the Math Sticks, or works on counting with me. It's not as instant a success as the Handwriting books, but I like the organization of the book - it is divided into sections, from easy to hard, so one can skip around the book and find new topics, but keep them sequential within each chapter. I'm surprised by some of the things that are easy for Helen that I thought she'd find hard, and even more surprised by some things she finds hard that seem obvious to me.

One thing the Miquon program stresses is letting the children decide how much and how fast. This is hard for me, but it seems to work. Yesterday, Helen seemed completely puzzled by the idea of [ ] + 2 = 4, but then today, she was putting her markers away and announced, 'Three plus four equals seven,' and suddenly she could finish the page she'd floundered on the day before. I find myself biting my tongue and trying to remember that she has to work out all the basic rules and formulas on her own - it's been too long since I had to figure out [ ] + 2 = 4.

The Miquon Math program comes with three teachers' books: Notes for Teachers, Lab Sheet Annotations and First Grade Diary. Notes is very helpful, and the Lab Sheet Annotations look like they will help in the later grades (right now, I can still keep up with the work). The Diary would be more interesting to a teacher of a big classroom, but I keep meaning to finish reading it. One thing I like about the program is they don't expect students to do all the problems, just enough to understand the practice. Certainly one could do that with the textbooks I remember from school - pages of drill on the same type of problem - but these books seem to lend themselves to jumping around. Each page is perforated so they can be handed out as individual worksheets, but on a boat, I prefer to keep everything firmly attached.

We haven't yet begun reading lessons for Helen - she resists the idea. Her favorite thing is listening to stories read aloud, and she has an unusual patience for it. We've read her several of the Harry Potter books, Charlotte's Web, several of the Little House books, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, all books one wouldn't expect a three- and four-year-old to sit through. So perhaps she doesn't want to read because books of her reading level are going to be dull, or perhaps she thinks it will deprive her of cuddling and story times.

I bought the highly recommended Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, by Siegfried Engelmann. I don't like it. I can see the point of the structure, but the format is distinctly unfriendly. Each page is filled with small print (what the teacher says) and a few lines of large print (what the student reads). It is a distracting mess, and not something a five-year-old wants to gaze at. It's intimidating. I'm not sure what to do about it. I think Helen definitely could use some directed instruction in reading, and she seems to react really well to the day-by-day lessons of handwriting and math. I'm not going to start teaching reading until we reach Greenland, so I have another couple of weeks to figure out how to start.

This afternoon I started thinking about making a book that just included the letters, sounds, and words that Helen is expected to read, so she's only faced with one thing on a page, rather than a full page of small text. The other possibility is to write them on a dry erase board, which would certainly be easier.

The rest of "school" takes place without noticing it on the boat: wandering through tide pools, learning to tally when we're provisioning, practicing writing "TOM" on top of all the cans of tomatoes, visiting foreign countries, learning their flags, hearing foreign languages and accents. Before we left, I bought all the children's books on Greenland I could find, and more of the Dorling Kindersley (DK) Eyewitness Books (hardback monographs filled with photos and facts for 5-10 year olds). We have Ocean, Whale, Weather, Seashore and a dozen others.

Of course, the days she learns the most are the ones like yesterday: We canceled school and Hamish took them to a nearby science museum.

You can learn more about the Lairds and SEAL at their website www.expeditionsail.com.