The mission of Road School is for the kids to learn a solid school year’s worth of academics, yet keep the pencil and paper time down to two hours each day on the road.  The strategies for covering all the material in such a short time are to run for at least ten months; and to expand to three hours per day while in Paris, taking advantage of the stable home base. 

Still, I wondered if we could maintain even the two hours per day at first. The schedule took us through ten hotels in the first five weeks. 

So the kids started promptly on July 1, and they worked straight through the August 8 arrival in London. The Verdict: they could indeed handle that amount of time per day and make it productive even while on the road. 

The main curriculum issue on my side was that some of the math chapters and practice drills were initially taking several hours instead of 45 minutes. This was easily fixed once we got a better sense of timing.

Progress in July:  Carter learned new tools in geometry and number theory plus some nitty gritty rules about sentence structure and parts of speech.  Katherine learned how to multiply triple digit numbers and she can now do many fraction operations.  Both also worked through an introduction to Islam and the first half of introduction to Christianity.  

In the background they have read “assigned book club” texts about medieval times and Victorian London:  Crispin, Shakespeare Stealer (before attending Henry VIII at the Globe), Ruby in the Smoke, and a Study in Scarlet the first Sherlock Holmes novel, along with a collection of great essays about travel.  They have also practiced writing – hopefully you are seeing at least one blog posting per week from each!

Suitably encouraged from this start, we took a recess from August 8 to 31 while traveling with family, so the kids could have maximum fun playing with their cousins during the summer. 

Finally now here it is Autumn, and here are Carter and Katherine on September 1. As with many schoolkids, this week it is time to put away the shorts and hit the books. 

On the docket for Road School mornings in September: enrichment geometry for Carter, decimals for Katherine, grammar, Judaism, mapping the globe, a few home physics experiments, writing exercises, and a mystery novel set in 1800s Paris.

Under a typical Paris schedule, Carter and Katherine will have Road School in the mornings, then we will take lunch and a long walk as a family to explore someplace new in Paris, and then the kids have activities in the afternoons.  Gina is setting up the activities and she will post about those later. Piggy is hinting she would like to join one of these walks as well…