Boat schooling , an Epiphany
I have been busy getting my head around the whole ‘boat schooling’ thing in the last 2 weeks , A few months ago I was convinced that we would enter both girls in the ‘Wereldschool’ (worldschool) as I wanted to make absolutely sure they would get the best schooling and the best possible assistance so they wouldnt get back with ‘gaps’ in their knowledge and abilities .
When Robin came home the other day she proudly sat behind the laptop , opened the school website , clicked a few times and she said ‘Dad, look here , you’ve been asking a few time what we do at school , where we are .. here are all the books we use and what we do’
I looked and smiled, this was exactly what I needed ! , the school detailed all the books, per year , every subject and which books they used !
I kissed Robin and thanked her , she looked at me and she told me she didn’t want to be kissed by me and went off to play
Next step for me was to basically copy every title , book and piece of info off the schoolsite into a spreadsheet by year for both of the girls . Then I googled for an education website that has these books , and looked at the whole list that went with that particular curriculum
- Workbook 1a
- workbook 2a
- teacher guide
- answer book
- note book 1a
- note book 2a
etc etc , and it slowly unfolded before me , this is what the school uses , and what we would get from the ‘wereldschool’ if we order , for example, 1 year of dutch language ! Looking at the prices from the ‘official’ website my mind started wandering as well. Even though its half the price that the wereldschool charges , its still a lot of monies. So google , my best friend at that point , suggested a ‘surplus education bookstore’ and after a few clicks I found they had every book I needed !
SO going back, I copied all the info and order numbers, from the official site , per year in the spreadsheet , and looked them up on the surplus store , slowly building a list of needed books for the next 4 years . When finished it dawned on me as well that , to save some more monies, Robin doesnt have to be enrolled in the worldschool the whole 4 years , we could just do that the last 2 years so there would be an ‘official’ dossier built up with ‘official’ tests taken to get her into high school . And Lauren could use some of the books we ordered for Robin in the last 2 years , as long as we order new ‘work books’ for her
Ok , so looked everything up , recalculated and it all looks great ! And I am ready to order , says my much better half Joline ‘Lets just order 1 package , for 1 topic to see what it looks like’ , ok … ermmm.. why ? , well it didn’t take much to convince me (and she has the task of formally educating the kids so who am I to question her on that subject ?) So I ordered the ‘History’ package for group 5 (thats when they are 8 YO) and it arrived the next day , 128 euro for the whole shebang . Joline took the books with her and looked them over and when I asked her she was confident this is exactly what we needed ! *pfew*
So , no worldschool for Lauren , and only 2 years for a few subjects for Robin ! saved a bunch of monies and overall a good experience as I now am much more familiar with the whole schooling thing !
And now I need to figure out where to spend that ‘saved’ money , Rum anyone ? 🙂