Developing Worldschooling Curriculum: Reading

Reading is of course a natural place to start in building your worldschooling curriculum. Whether you are traveling occasionally or full-time, finding a variety of books to complement and inform your kids' explorations serves to make both the travel and the reading more engaging for all. Our resources include e-books, audiobooks, books picked up at local bookstores, books and magazines the kids can read alone, as well as biographies and history books for reading aloud as a family. 

Here are some of the ways we have woven reading into our worldschooling curriculum. I hope these help spark some ideas for your own curriculum development and travel planning!

We look for historical tales, myths, fairytales and fables related to each country we visit. Depending on what I find and their reading level, I either assign the reading to my kids as one of their activities for the week, or we read the book aloud as a family—often in nightly installments that continue over several weeks. Typically, I ask the kids to then do something with the story, whether it is drawing a picture, making up their own story in a similar vein, or paying an in-person visit to a relevant site. For example:

• During our circumnavigation of Sicily, we read Greek mythology as a family in the evenings, and then visited Greek ruins by day. One day, we looked out together over the supposed site of a famous chapter in the Odyssey when Odysseus and his crew had to choose between a disastrous brush with either Scylla or Charybdis. Another day, my daughter scrambled over Greek ruins, imagining herself on a mythological adventure. Toward the end of our journey, we found a precious hardbound, illustrated version of the odyssey as a reward for our youngest’s attentive listening to the stories.
• For our time in the Philippines, I found a book on local holidays and traditions. My children read the stories on their own (the older siblings reading to our youngest sometimes), and they drew pictures of their favorite local celebrations. We then talked with Filipinos about some of these traditions to get a firsthand view.
• In India, we assigned our kids history readings about Hinduism and the Hindu pantheon and then identified representations of the various gods everywhere we went and talked about their powers and meaning. As a family, we read a children’s version of the Bhagavad Gita each evening over many weeks. Along the way, we engaged in discussions as a family and with local friends about the stories and their interpretations, and we looked for references in temples, classical dance performances and other art.
• When we were living temporarily in Florence before heading to Rome, I found some textbook lessons on Julius Caesar and the Roman forum. I assigned them for weekly reading to my 9-year-old son, along with some related drawing and paragraph writing. Our youngest selected a classic book called This is Rome, which we read together little by little every day. A few weeks later, we walked together through Rome, spying the statue of Romulus and Remus, walking in Caesar’s footsteps through the Forum and imagining the roaring scenes at the Colosseum. For some of these sights, we sprang for a private historical tour guide who could engage our kids and help bring their reading about these places and stories further to life.

Exploring the Roman Forum They Had Read About the Week Before

Emerging reader activity

For our emerging reader when he was 3-5 years old, we downloaded the early reading series (for anglophones) of “Bob” books, worked through them together to learn the basics, and then used them as inspiration for creating individualized reading activities at the same reading level. Each week, I wrote a series of simple sentences at the top of several blank pages (on themes tied to our current geography and activities when possible), and my preschool-age child's task was to decipher the sentence independently and draw a corresponding picture. This gave him one fun “study” activity to do while his siblings worked on their own homeschooling assignments.

Early reader activity on the road

Bringing the World to Your Child Through Books

Please share your favorite books and resources for worldschooling kids at home and on the road. One book I really like as a wide-ranging resource for books that may be of interest to your family of global citizens: