How do you spell "y'arrrrrr"?

Should we leave as planned in two years for a projected five-year circ with a kid who will be coming up on 10, the question of education is bound to arise. Our current thinking is that we will work with his school and our provincial educational system to educate him more or less in the curriculum as it stands, with "enrichment" courtesy of our travels.

Needless to say, we are from a large city and are Canadian. Home schooling on a moving boat may not be possible where some live, although many cruisers with kids from the States at least seem to use the Calvert School curriculum (http://www.calvertschool.org/home-school/). I suppose one advantage of it is that you are supposed to receive everything, down to the pencils and crayons, in a big box. This has its appeal, but so does an honest attempt to keep our kid's education nominally Canadian.

Home schooling, or rather boat schooling, is not by its very nature as time-consuming as regular school. From all reports, this means our son will do about 120-130 minutes of fairly intensive schoolwork per day (as it will be "one on one"), which would be the case of a house-bound kid who couldn't physically get to school.

He will submit his work electronically, probably once a week, and will "appear" in class to present topic-specific reports. As my wife is a biologist and I come from a writing and media background, I expect the presentations will be acceptable.

I agree that structure is important, although a gale on passage might count as a "snow day"...or an opportunity for a project on bad weather!

We are already working on him at age seven to develop independent study habits...he's reading a hell of a lot, so that's a start.

This is our current thinking: Keep him "in school" via distance education, but incorporate some flexibility in his daily life.

He has a lot of friends and it would be nice if he could keep them as "pen pals with visuals" and it's an irony of the 21st century that social networking, satphones and easy access to self-made video production has to a great degree normalized "distance friendship" between kids.