Cross-Pollinating: Sharing our Substack

 

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6 Core Concepts for Worldschooling Families

We see worldschooling as a lifestyle where learning is centered around the world and its people, culture, and nature. It's a journey of discovery for the entire family – whether you’re exploring your own proverbial ‘backyard’ or traveling abroad. If you're considering this path, here are six core concepts to guide you, from your first steps to a sustainable, long-term approach.

1. Dabble

The best place to start is by exploring your child(ren)’s interests. What are they naturally curious about? Instead of diving into a rigid curriculum, dabble in various topics to see what sticks.

• Use surveys or interest inventories like the Renzulli Profiler to discover passions you might not have known about. Get in touch with us if you’d like to try this out. 

• Spend time at your local library, letting your children browse freely and pick books based on what catches their eye.

• Visit nearby museums, parks, or historical sites. Pay attention to what sparks questions and conversations.

By allowing this initial exploration, you'll build a foundation for learning that feels exciting and personal, not like a chore.

2. Reconfigure Routines

Moving away from a traditional school and 9-5:00 schedules can be a big adjustment. Rather than trying to replicate the classroom, think about what kind of structure works for your family. Some people thrive on a more strict routine, while others need flexibility.

The key is to find a rhythm that balances the needs of everyone in your family. If you have children with different needs or learning styles, you might need to compromise to create a schedule that gives everyone space to learn and grow. This is where the concept of "unschooling" often comes into play, allowing for more spontaneous, interest-led learning.

Here’s a free template you can adapt for your needs.

3. Find Resources

Your local community is a treasure trove of learning opportunities. Start local by planning day trips or field trips to museums, libraries, and historical landmarks. These short outings are a great way to test the waters of learning outside the home. 

Once you feel comfortable, plan an overnight or weekend trip. This is a crucial step for understanding your family’s travel needs. As you get more established, try incorporating learning experiences into your vacations. For example, a trip to Copenhagen could include a visit to the Viking Ship Museum along with enjoying the Tivoli Gardens.

For longer stays, consider slow travel, which involves staying in one location for an extended period (often three months, depending on visa regulations). This allows you to truly immerse yourselves in a culture and community.

No matter where you are, online resources are abundant. Our community, Worldschooling Quest, has a searchable database filled with resources to help you along the way.

4. Connect with a Tribe

Worldschooling can feel isolating at first, but you are not alone. Finding a community of like-minded families is essential for support and inspiration. You can connect with worldschool hubs, home education groups or alternative education providers for practical advice, emotional support, and even travel companions.

Groups like Family Travel Hive are great places to start. These communities offer a sense of belonging and a space to share your experiences, challenges, and triumphs. You can even create your own swarm to find others nearby with similar interests.

If you’d like to experience cross-cultural connections without travel, we offer Quest Path sessions online, which develop essential skills through real-world, collaborative problem solving utilizing technology. 

5. Be Open & Adapt 

The most memorable moments in worldschooling often happen when you least expect them. It’s important to stay open-minded and willing to adapt your plans. Sometimes, the friends you meet along the way will change your trajectory entirely, leading to spontaneous adventures. 

For instance, our family's plans shifted when we met new friends in Bali. We ended up celebrating birthdays at their hotel – the Hard Rock in Kuta, a memory that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been open to a change of plans.

6. Communicate, Reflect, Iterate

Worldschooling is a continuous learning process for everyone. Set aside time, at least once a week, for a family check-in. This is a dedicated space to communicate openly and honestly with each other.

One great method is the "roses and thorns" reflection. Everyone shares a "rose" (a high point or something they enjoyed) and a "thorn" (a challenge or something that didn't go well). For example, your child might say, "My rose was seeing the monkeys in the jungle today, but my thorn was feeling tired during the hike." This simple practice helps you understand each other's experiences and gives you insight into what’s working and what’s not.

Based on these reflections, you can iterate your approach. To stay on track, establish SMART goals for your family in various areas, such as finances, education, and well-being. For example, we have a goal to complete a monthly learning project, like our son Leo’s presentation about shipwrecks. We also have an annual budget spreadsheet to ensure our spending aligns with our financial goals.

Of course you can keep a personal diary or journal to reflect your internal thoughts too. My husband James often says to our 7-year-old son, “If you go into this with a negative mindset, it will be negative. If you take on a positive mindset, it will be positive.” By communicating regularly and reflecting on your journey, you can continuously refine your worldschooling experience to make it a sustainable and enriching adventure for everyone.

Where are you on your worldschooling journey? We’d love to hear from you! 

– Jess Marsh 

   INTL Edu Director & Cofounder

Blindly Navigating the Gili Islands

Originally written 26th May 2025

I made a major mistake leaving my 👁️ contact lenses in our bags in Sanur (Bali, Indonesia), only discovering this after the 4-hour ‘fast’ boat ride to Gili T island. At first I thought it was just annoying to not be able to wear sunglasses… Then it hit me - our main activity for the brief weekend trip was 🤿 snorkeling! After researching the possibility of various masks and checking if I could buy contacts anywhere on the small island without cars (just horse-drawn carts, bicycles and electric scooters) - I was 100% SOL. It was unsurprisingly impossible. I was unsure about trying to snorkel without my contacts, because I'm really myopic (AKA ‘blind as a bat’). Legally too blind to drive. So could I trust James and Leo to navigate us through a choppy sea?

Well, I decided to give it a try. During the first snorkeling session, we lost our group amongst other tour groups and couldn't find the boat (I literally couldn't read the boat names if you gave me $1 million) but after those moments of panic, we found our guide and boat and didn't make the same mistake again. I couldn't see the detail of the beauty under the sea but I was able to identify the colors of the fish blobs and coral!

I thought the tour company was a bit boastful by 100% guaranteeing us to see a 🐢 turtle. James joked that perhaps they had a turtle in a box on the boat just in case. But then, at the end of the trip, this magic happened…

This turtle chilled with us for a bit!

The value for the money was excellent. It was nice to revisit Gili Air for lunch as well, which looked quite different from 9 years ago. So many 🛥️ boats!

I hope we can come back diving one day, when Leo is old enough, and I hope there are still beautiful creatures thriving in the Gilis. We saw so much dying coral 🪸 on each of the islands - quite sad. There are great organizations like the Gili Eco Trust working on reef restoration.

Trusting in Serial Reciprocity

Originally written 5th April 2025

When you’re a solo traveler, there’s often an unsaid trust amongst other females, for example, that hopefully you will look out for each other in precarious situations. In my experience, you feel this vibe from others, if it’s there. We found that there’s a whole other level of trust when you involve family – trusting almost-strangers with your child(ren). 

Instances when we’ve trusted and helped others abroad:

• 

  Returned rental car back to the mainland for people we met once

• 

  Loaned our spare laptop to a single mother we’d never met, whose work computer was kaput

• 

  Transferred a few hundred quid’s worth of local currency to our neighbor in Thailand, so that she could withdraw it for us from a bank without the ATM fee

• 

  Let our child go for a playdate at someone else’s place and they drove him home (we had met them many times during the weeks here) 

• 

  Took the opportunity to have a ‘date dinner’ by ourselves when our friend offered to have our son help her with a sand sculpture on the beach for an hour or so

• 

  Left our son for hours each week to do art lessons with a parent and 20+ other kids 

How others showed trust in us: 

• 

  A bunch of families trusted James to teach their kids swim lessons (and he did a great job!)

• 

  In Thailand, we drove several children in our rental car, sometimes without their parents present

• 

  We kept an eye on the kids in our villa’s pool when their parents weren’t nearby

• 

  Women’s Circle leader allowed me to use technology to improve registration and comms for her events

• 

  Impromptu play dates 

• 

  Bliss hub leaders shared our community with the larger group 

How do these instances make you feel, especially if you can look at the scenarios from a parental perspective? As you might have thought in our last post, is this insanity?! Or has the Western world conditioned us to be untrusting, skeptical, afraid? Perhaps the pandemic contributed to some of this fear as we all became a bit more insular. Each of these examples has its own story and luckily all of them ended positively.

Honestly, my inner anxiety compass was wavering some of these times but I trusted my intuition and tried to quiet my logical mind from worrying. The real trust had to start with trusting ourselves. We observed how relaxed the local island culture was and also how much the worldschool community relied on each other like a ‘village’ raising the children. All of these examples would be naturally done at ‘home’ – in a place where you’ve known the people for months or years. Although we were only here for a few weeks, the connections felt much deeper than that. Perhaps it is the way of this lifestyle that the masks are thinner and you can see people for who they are, purely and truly. 

What have you done lately to ‘pay it forward’? Who has shown you trust? I’d love to hear.

– Jess