Road School was one of the most challenging and enjoyable parts of our year-long adventure, but alas, the last day arrived today.  I could see the children putting on brave faces to mask their sorrow.  All they can look forward to now is a bit of summer reading.  It was a bittersweet milestone.

If the words “curriculum plan” quicken your heartbeat and you have a cup of coffee in front of you, then read on.  There is a detailed review and wrap-up of the year below for your enjoyment.

Otherwise:   just be happy for Carter and Katherine – school’s out for summer!

Overview

Traveling around the world is a special time, so we wanted to spend the days outside and not behind a desk.  On the other hand, the kids had to meet all state requirements, and I wanted to try teaching new material in new ways, so we needed some quiet time each day.

How much?  Gina and I eventually agreed that we would allocate exactly 2 hours per weekday.  We could make up for short hours by running eleven full months – from July 1 to May 30 with only a few short breaks.  In total we assigned 225 days of Road School work.

To this we added 30 novels – chosen to be relevant to the local country – and 100 “great” essays to read.

They kids also wrote and published weekly blog posts to practice writing.

Lastly, while in France each child took 60 hours of privately tutored French language and phonetics classes from professional instructors across four months.

The three main courses were How to Be a Math Ninja, Understanding the World, and Tell Your Story.

How to Be a Math Ninja

Majoring in math at college, I concluded that my middle school math program – conventional in approach – was a missed opportunity.  Here was a chance to try a fresh approach.

Math is usually taught one topic at a time.  After a few weeks, the class moves on.  But in real life, you see problems out of context.  You have to recognize which tool to use at the moment it is needed.

So, one big idea to try was parallelism.  We taught all the topics continuously, across the year.  I hoped that by mixing many types of problems, the kids would develop a general capability with math, rather than just parroting back that week’s lessons.

Another big idea was “turn the crank”.  By working a vast number of problems, the kids would generally raise their level of experience and familiarity.  I wanted them to spend the bulk of their time solving problems and studying answers.  There would not be any lectures; instead they would work alone at their own pace and just ask for help when needed.  And we would mix the problem types together in a jumble, forcing them to select the right approach rather than follow a pattern.

[NOTE:  see this New York Times article for explanation of why this may be good pedagogy]

For Katherine, Massachusetts topics in grade 4 are:  multiplication and division of bigger numbers, fractions, decimals, percents and some basics in geometry, estimation and measurement.

To cover these, she completed four books:  Primary Challenge Math and Problem Solving Genius by Ed Zaccaro;  and Math Doesn’t Suck and Kiss My Math by Danica McKellar – all highly recommended.  Girls will love McKellar in particular – she is both a TV star and a math whiz and she writes in a dishy, gossipy style that is engaging and effective.

To turn the crank, we also gave Katherine 60 hours of drills from worksheets downloaded from the Internet (labeled K1-K60), and another 80 hours of drills from online programs IXL and TenMarks.  Of these she preferred TenMarks, which has super videos to explain material, provides games to reward progress, and has a better scoring system than IXL.  We printed K1-K60 onto paper in Natick so Katherine could do those on the days without Internet access.

In this manner, Katherine covered each of her State-assigned topics at least four separate times across the year – once in the problem sets, once in the Zaccaro books, once in the McKellar books, and once online.  That occupied her hour of math on Mondays through Thursdays (see Friday below).

For Carter’s math curriculum, we had a dilemma because he had already covered pre-Algebra at his old school.  We consulted with the Math Department at Park and they suggested we focus on enrichment rather than Algebra, because that would be taught in their eighth grade.  So we needed a year’s worth of middle school math outside a traditional curriculum.  What to do?

The New England Math League provided a framework we could adopt.  They hold five meets per year.  Each meet has topics in four core areas:  Geometry, Number Theory, Arithmetic, and Algebra.  As the year progresses, the material gets harder.  They have the problem sets from the past ten years available for free on their web site, and there is a fully explained solution for each problem.  Nice!  We consulted with Ms. Lindsay Gabriel, one of the teachers running the math team at Wilson Middle School.  She pointed us to a book from the Math League called Hard Math that is laid out with that same framework.

The book had 20 sections, so we spread those across 40 weeks.  During each 2-week mini-period, Carter would read the Hard Math chapter on Monday, complete five problems sets on Tuesday, and then return to do another five problem sets the following Tuesday.    So each core area was revisited ten times across the year (parallelism) and he completed 600 math team problems in total (turn the crank).

The other Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays were for enrichment topics from all areas of math.  These were organized by book.  Carter worked through Challenge Math and Problem Solving Genius by Ed Zaccaro and Competition Math for Middle School by J. Batterson.

The Batterson book is fascinating and somewhat hard, serving as a bridge toward the ultra-intense Art of Problem Solving series.  It covers basic Algebra (he gives an upfront introduction because light algebra is used in the rest of the book), Counting, Probability, Number Theory and Geometry.  The text is clear and concise.  There are so many problems that I only assigned half of them per chapter (the odds).  Batterson also scatters its answers across many pages in the back, so you can check a result without unintentionally seeing answers to the rest of your problem set.

Fridays for both kids was something different – a holistic review of the whole year, repeated every week.  To do that efficiently, we used Math Contest books by Steven Conrad that provide a simple 30 minute multiple-choice contest for each grade level.  It was gratifying to see the kids increasing their scores on these tests as the year progressed.

Assessment:  Heck, yes.  The kids took a big leap toward becoming math ninjas!  You could criticize that they are not 100% locked tight on every topic they saw.  The material was just too broad for that, especially in Carter’s case which covered many fields.  But they are more versatile and comfortable with math than ever before.

Special Lessons:  As the year progressed, there were many timed tests.  Can you believe that a staggering 70% of wrong answers were due to one single cause?!  It was from not reading the question correctly!    The big ah-hah is:  Read The Question (“RTQ”).

Understanding the World

The idea here is that you need context to make good decisions.  As Ms. A would say, you need schema.

In some sense this was the biggest course of all, as the children spent all year out in the world.  They listened to countless stories of history, met numerous new people, and experienced many new cultures directly.  They rode bicycles, horses, camels, and elephants.  They ate a pantheon of new foods.  They were instructed on cooking, calligraphy, acting, tai chi, pottery, cloth weaving, jewelry, fashion, basket-weaving, art, architecture, skeet shooting, archery, cricket, fly-fish casting, Maori dancing, rice planting, zip-lining, crab hunting, gold-panning, axe-throwing, turban-wrapping and E Ink screen-making.

The Road School curriculum supported this with 30-60 minutes per day of textbook learning.  The largest source was a 200-page workbook on World Religions aimed at grade 6, introducing kids in a fairly open-minded way to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Taoism.  We felt that religion is such a vital part of world cultures that we had to make a big investment here.  We spaced these out to correspond to the itinerary and then augmented the texbook by attending actual services in nearly all of those religions, plus a Shinto shrine in Japan and a Confucian temple in China.

The kids also completed a workbook covering one map per week.  This was a mix of learning map skills and of seeing many maps from around the world.   This satisfied a state goal.

Many of the books on our reading list were set in foreign lands.  These stories were excellent for teaching the local culture in a fun way and for generating questions to the guides.

This is also the area where we ought to have covered science.  The state requires a smidgeon of chemistry and of physics but we just did not have the right time or resources to cover it well.  The original plan called for us to at least do a home science experiment each week while in France and our kids were excited for that.  But it took me weeks of adjusting to Paris to find the long list of odd materials needed.  In the end we did only three experiments.

We did cover other types of science during the tours.  We were learning earth science when we visited volcanoes, caves, and other geological formations; we were inside a living biology lab in Australia and the Galapagos.  So we did a fine job with earth science and ecology, though that was not the assigned topic.

Assessment:  this year was exceptionally rich in learning about the world and nothing beats hands-on experience.  Much of what the kids learned simply cannot be taught in the classroom.  So A+ here.  On the downside, the learning was quite broad – 23,000 miles wide and an inch deep.  After such an introduction, one hopes they can now confidently select a few favorite areas for focus.

Special Lessons:  the richest learning came from what we did not what we saw.  So set up your itinerary to include hands-on experiences and not only passive tours.  The kids will learn tons and you will have a lot of fun as well.

Tell Your Story

The last course was focused on communication.  We had a four-pronged attack:  grammar, vocabulary, exceptional authors as a model, and writing practice.

Each child had two English grammar workbooks that they completed during the year, giving them two spins through the material for repetition.  I was horrified by how little they knew in this area and if anything I wish we had added a third cycle.  Schools seem to have abandoned grammar compared to when I was a kid – maybe it is just not tested on the MCAS?  Anyway we spent about 15 minutes per day on this, finishing up the workbooks by about March.  Much work remains here.

Vocabulary grows more or less naturally as the kids read.  The Kindles are helpful since they have built-in dictionaries.  We did a few vocabulary exercises as well and we liked the Wordly Wise book series.

To teach writing, one begins with good sentences, then good paragraphs, then good compositions.  At the start of the year the kids did not seem to fully understand the idea that sentences have subjects and verbs!  So we commenced there.  The grammar books helped.  Katherine profited especially from a brief workbook called Writing Fabulous Sentences and Paragraphs.

Then the next issue was to use paragraphs and how do you teach that?  We found a resource here that the kids LOVED called Six-Way Paragraphs.  You read just a brief few paragraphs, and then the book asks you to identify the main point, the topic sentence and so forth.  On Wednesdays they would do 5 of these which took about half an hour.  Well the readings are so fascinating in these books that this was the first thing they did every Wednesday!   They completed two full books each across the year, a total of 200 exercises.

Our most aspirational idea to teach vocabulary and writing was for the kids to “read great essays” from the English language.  We used essays rather than novels because they come in short doses and because the kids were reading plenty of novels already.  There are quite a few essays available on About.com and we chose subjectively 100 of the best.  The writers included Max Beerbaum, G. K. Chesterton, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Henry Fielding, E. M. Forster, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Graves, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Hazlitt, Ernest Hemingway, Washington Irving, William James, Jack London, H. L. Mencken, George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf and a handful of U.S. Presidents. The essays were truly magnificent.  They totaled 400 pages of text, so we broke them into 8 collections across the year:  Travel, Long Walks, Holiday Memories, Advice on Writing, Making a Point, Struggles, Nature and Narrative, and Wisdom.

The kids did not enjoy the first three collections.  The essays were boring or dry or complicated and used big words, requiring lots of brain power and dictionary time to decipher.  For this reason, we delayed the last five collections to the end of the year, when the kids would be as old as possible.  To motivate the reading, they had to find “the single best sentence” in each and to write it out in longhand on paper.  During book club they would share and compare the sentences and explain why they chose them.  That worked better.

Conversely the books selected for Book Club were all hits.  These had all been pulled from lists published by schools or libraries and they typically had a 4-star or higher review on Amazon.  Special thanks to Wilson librarian Amy Bloom for her suggestions.  Most were on the Kindle; we carried the other books from home and gave those away once completed.

I was glad we created a formal reading list as, left to their own devices, the kids would have read 100 fantasy novels!  By assigning books, we broadened their range and appreciation.  It was pretty fun for the adults too.

Next we turn to writing practice.  Carter and Katherine each worked through a simple “Writer’s Notebook” that we found at the bookstore.  That was fairly lightweight.  I also gave the kids a dozen 30-minute writing topics and asked them to make timed responses, e.g. what is your favorite flavor of ice cream and why?  This is a lot like what they do for MCAS and ISEE, where some poor soul has to evaluate writing based on a brief sample.  We developed a strategy on how to approach these assignments that seemed to help.  Katherine told me at the end of the year that these sessions were one of the best things we had done in Road School.

The centerpiece of the writing practice was of course the blog and you can judge the progress for yourself.

Assessment:  we had a mixed bag here.  The best practices were to develop a reading list so that the kids would see many types of writing and to create many, many writing opportunities so that they would practice and develop their own skills.  We should continue that in the future.

One of the key takeaways is how hard writing is to teach.  Writing is not something you can correct quickly, nor even explain easily.  Gina is fond of quoting someone she knew who said “before you can teach writing, you have to teach thinking.”  Yikes.  Another hurdle is motivation… writing is hard!  Blank pages are scary!  The kids were apt to complain if assigned a writing topic that did not instantly engage their imagination.  Sometimes we pushed them ahead anyway because you cannot always select your topic.  Toward the end we turned to a resource that turned out to be great called “40 Writing Prompts with Graphic Organizers” by Scholastic.  We carried that around for months before it was used and it was worth it.  It is also the case that “you get out what goes in” which means, the initial writing from the kids was reminiscent of whatever TV shows, movies, video games and fantasy novels they had recently experienced.  Thankfully this improved over time.

Special Lessons:  the tip that helped Katherine and Carter the most for timed writing prompts was:   don’t write about the first topic that jumps to mind! In the first two minutes, think of many possible topics.  List a few key points you would make about each.  Then you can choose the best topic for a strong and interesting essay.

Putting it All Together

With so many moving parts, are you surprised that we needed a spreadsheet?  We laid out the schedule of the trip day by day, and then filled in by days of the week.  On the first day of each month, we would email a calendar that listed every weekday and assigned 2-4 tasks for each.  Weekends were time to relax or catch up if needed.

For example, on December 1 in Paris:

“Carter:  Challenge Math – Chapter 19 Level 1 and 2, Grammar – page 95, Six-Way Paragraphs (next 5 pages), French (90 minute class).

Katherine:  Primary Challenge Math – Chapter 18, Fabulous Sentences pp35-38, French (90 minute class).”

Reading list books were assigned 2 weeks ahead of time and the kids had to manage their schedules to finish in time for the book club discussion that Gina would run.

Pace

Fitting this in started off to be quite hectic, since the summer schedule was packed tight.  The kids felt overwhelmed by the addition of 2 hours of schoolwork on top of a full day of touring.  We did not relent however.  Gina and I committed to find the time during the week, even if it had to be patchwork.  There were some days where the kids had no time and some where we stayed in the hotel for an afternoon and they did 2 or 3 days worth of assignments.  This lack of routine added stress and made everyone cranky.

In Paris the schedule improved – the kids took Road School all morning (2 hours with me plus 1.5 hours of French with Blandine) and then tour or do activities (like cooking or acting classes) in the afternoons.

As we got back on the road in 2011, we eventually found the perfect system:  we slowed down the touring just a bit.  We gave the kids the flexibility to do their daily schoolwork “whenever you desire BUT (!) no video games, no Internet, and no pleasure reading is allowed until you are caught up.”    So the kids would choose the time to do the work and it was OK to fall behind in a given day, but not for fun, only due to being too busy with the travel.

Well the net result of this freedom and flexibility was a great eagerness to get the assignments out of the way!  The kids would spring out of bed in the morning even before the parents rose and get started.  They were allowed to work during breakfast if desired and could sometimes complete the assignments before breakfast was over.  By the time we got back to the hotel in the afternoon they were almost always free and clear to relax.  This was a long-term sustainable pace for all.

Bottom Line

The kids learned a great deal of math, a huge amount of content, something about writing, and a bit of French.  We hope that it has kept them up to date with their grade level and wish them every success as they re-integrate with a Bricks and Mortar School at Park next year.