When My Homeschoolers Attended School in Ecuador

After being homeschooled their entire life, Asher and Journey finally experienced going to school, but this is Ecuador, so it's completely in Spanish! Talk about immersion! I expected tears for the first few weeks, and braced myself for their first day. They arrived home with a burst of words and excitement. They LOVED it, made friends and couldn't wait to return the next day!

A four-day weekend later, their enthusiasm waned. Their biggest complaint was getting up at 6am for school. Don't we all despise getting up early for school or work? Sorry kids, that's just life.

 They played futbol (soccer) for the first time and though everyone else had been playing for years, they managed to learn the game and get a little bit of playing time in.

 

They participated in some really cool class projects. My favorite was when the class split into groups to represent three different cultures of Ecuador- Coastal, Sierra (mountain) and Selva (jungle). Each child spoke about a different aspect of the culture and introduced food and drinks typical of the area for everyone to try.

This was the day Asher ate a chontacuro (palm grub- see the stick on the left).

Afterwards they demonstrated a typical dance for that area.

School schedules don't exist here. This was one of the weirdest things for me to adjust to. I am used to school schedules being issued prior to the beginning of the school year with every day off listed. In Shell, even in June, no one could tell me when the school year would end. Some days the kids would come home unexpectedly 3 hours early, other days they would come home and say, "oh there's no school tomorrow". One week they came home on Monday and said there wouldn't be school on Friday. On Tuesday, they said they do have school. On Wednesday they said it might be only half a day. They ended up going to school for 3 hours that Friday.

When school finally wrapped up on July 5th, they were sad to leave the friends they'd made. Asher and Journey have picked up quite a bit of Spanish. One day, someone was speaking to me in Spanish and afterwards Journey asked if the woman said "...", when I said yes, she replied, "How did I know that?!" By the time we left Ecuador, our children were answering basic questions from strangers in spanish.

I am so very thankful that the school and teachers were open to accepting our children as students and working with them as wonderfully as they did. The principal mentioned he would be open to this type of arrangement again in the future, so if it's something you would be interested in, let me know and I can pass along the information.