Our homeschool year of 2025-2026 starts with us leaving to live on our boat again. Even though we are on the other side of the world, we are still trying to follow Alberta homeschool protocol. Thank goodness that I can do our first home visit through zoom!
Our traveling makes hands on science, and social studies better than anything we could get if we stayed in Canada, but as we have been traveling, we have done conventional “reading, writing and arithmetic” as well. I know that’s what Westward is interested in the most, so let’s start with that.
First, as a family we’ve been reading many books. We’ve read the whole series of “The Reckoners” series by Brandon Sanderson. Brandon Sanderson is Daniel’s favourite author and he has read everything of his that he can get his hands on.
We have also been reading “The Chronicles of Narnia” as a family. So far, we’ve read “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” and “The Magician’s Nephew.” We’ve stopped throughout and talked about all the symbolism and lessons within them.
We have also started reading “Call it Courage.” I thought this was the perfect book to read to my kids as we are exactly in the right atmosphere for such a book (that takes place in ancient Polynesia.)
Now for individual Reading Writing and Arithmetic. Youngest to Oldest.
Abraham’ English.
Abraham has been reading tons. He steals William’s Kindle whenever he can. I also bought him some fun books. He’s been reading ‘The Parent Agency” and “AniMalcolm.” These books are over 350 pages, and he loves them. I think these are the first big books he’s read for fun.
As far as writing goes, Abraham struggles to make his writing nice. I need to work on this more with him. He’s extremely creative and can make up awesome stories, it’s just his handwriting that is pretty bad.
I think I’m going to have him do TTRS spelling and typing, but he’s been doing his All About Spelling as well.
Abraham’s Math:
Abraham has been working on square roots and the Pythagorus theorem. He’s been figuring unknown sides of triangles and things and is moving right along in math.
William’s English:
William has been reading the “Wings of Fire” series on his kindle as we’ve been sailing. He still reads for fun even though he hasn’t branched out very much yet (I think this is his 3rd time of reading Wings of Fire?)
He is writing alright. He likes to be silly with his writing, but hey, he’s writing and his handwriting is good, so I’m all for it.
He’s also working on All About Spelling, but we will probably do TTRS when we’re back in Canada.
William’s Math:
William just finished Video Text’s level “A.” He is working with balancing equations, Venn diagrams, sets, and functions. In other words, he’s doing just fine in math.
Daniel’s English:
Daniel is taking a business class from BYUI called “Organizational Leadership.” With all the crazy time and location issues we are having, this is Daniel’s only class right now. BUT he is getting 99%. So, although it’s just one class, he’s doing great.
I put this in English because just look at all of his assignments he’s doing: Case Studies and Learning Journals are the bulk of what he does in his class and these are perfect for English. Also, he’s making things like “Leadership Project Reports.” Which also is very…..Englishy.
Daniel Math:
Daniel will be doing math next semester.
Everyone’s Science and Social Studies:
Okay, now we’re onto the fun stuff. Pretty much everything we’ve been doing for the past few months falls into these two categories, so I’m going to tell you what we’ve been up to.
When we were in New Zealand, we saw a lot of Marine Biology up close! One afternoon, a pod of dolphins surrounded and played with our dinghy! And a seal came to play.
But the usual thing that my boys did was to collect shells for their collection.
Dustin even had them put them in said to get down to the mother-of-pearl. Sounds very science if you ask me.
We also went to caves that deep down had TONS of glow worms in them.
And of course Waterfalls….because New Zealand is paradise.
We also went to a few hot springs. We even saw some boiling mud. This was actually SO FUN to watch! The mud was constantly slurping and it smelled like the earth was farting, according to my boys. We talked about the science of that a bit.
That whole time we had been fixing the boat, and Daniel was Dustin’s right hand man. He was learning about electric work, plumbing, navionics, machinery, and so much more as he helped get us ready to sail to Tonga. And of course, he's become our main dinghy driver.
About Sailing to Tonga…..well, we DID try to sail to Tonga. I really don’t want to talk about the some of the worst 48 hours of my life. Let’s just say it was bad. We all were so sick (we were sick beyond seasickness. Many think it was the chicken right before leaving, but it was bad before then for me.)
Then, after a day of hell. (I never use that word, but it’s needed here) our autopilot stopped working. When trying to fix the autopilot, the navionics (our GPS/maps/direction) went out for ten minutes. For ten minutes I thought “well, most sea farers of old didn’t die. Maybe we won’t either….or maybe we will.” And when it went back on, we turned around and went back to New Zealand.
No, we didn’t have a back up GPS like we usually do. No, we did not have internet since BOTH of our Starlinks did not work.
This experience broke Dustin. He refused to go on a crossing again. However, we were getting kicked out of New Zealand because our boat had been there for two years which was the time limit for a boat not registered there. So, even though we were in debt and had no money, we hired a crew to take the boat to Fiji. While the hired crew sailed to Fiji, we flew to Tonga.
All of this together was really hard on our marriage.
ANYWAY. We were in Tonga, and that’s the point.
Tonga was amazing. From the second we got off the plane, we knew this was going to be an adventure.
Tonga was amazing because of our friend, Malia. We had met Malia when she was on her mission in Cardston. She had been stuck in Canada during COVID. She was on a mission for THREE YEARS! And on the way home, she was on a lay over in New Zealand when the huge oceanic volcano went off that caught Tonga in tsunamis.
But now she was home, and she was our guide and friend the whole time.
One of the first things she did was to take us to a missionary homecoming. I was not expecting this. The missionaries were treated like kings. Literally! They had thrones and they also had so many leis put on them that you could hardly see their head! They even had the whole community do dances in their honour.
I asked Malia if it was like that for her, and she said “No” because everyone was still worried about COVID. After three years, she wasn’t even able to get her due celebration. She wasn’t bitter about it, and feels like it was all meant to be.
She took us to the Tonga blowholes. It was crazy to feel the power of the waves. Also she took us to caves that we went cliff jumping in….yes you read that right and yes it was just as incredible as it sounds.
The caves were just by the beach and some missionaries were there and started teaching Abraham just then. Meanwhile, Malia was showing us which shellfish we could eat.
Do you see the traditional clothing of those cute sisters? Everyone who is being formal still wears their traditional clothing! And I was given some by Malia and her family. That was truly special.
Malia also took us to “The Burden of Maui” which is basically a Tongan Stonehenge that was made by Maui himself.
We also went to the island where Malia grew up. We took the local ferry, which was an experience in itself.
We toured their village and school. Tonga is much more established and richer than Vanuatu, and it was very interesting to see the differences between the countries.
We stayed with Malia’s parents, and felt like we were part of the family. William helped shred some coconuts, and Daniel raked their yard.
They even gave us a true proper feast where they cooked an entire pig on a spit. I felt so honoured and so spoiled.
They took us to one of two rivers in all of Tonga. Interestingly, Tonga gets most of its water by rain fall, not wells, but the rainwater just gets soaked up by to coral of the ground so fast, so there are no rivers. Also, most of Tonga has no mountains or hills. So this river was very special to them
They also took us around the island. We went to their cliffs that have myths connected to them, and we walked until we got to this natural bridge that was also made by Maui. Daniel really loved this.
We also went with them to their farm and helped them take all their watermelons to market. Many of them we took onto the ferry back to the main island.
Once we were on the main island, we tried to go swim with the whales. This is a thing in Tonga. You can swim with whales. However, we did not see whales that trip even though we paid a thousand dollars to take all of us.
I felt a little better about this when I heard our boating friend say that you can’t find the moms on your yacht anyway, and you really need to go with someone there anyway. Even though they had their catamaran there, they still paid for someone to take them out. I had been feeling even more frustrated that everything went wrong when we tried to sail to Tonga because that meant we didn’t swim with whales, but I guess sailing to Tonga wouldn’t have been a sure thing anyway.
Tonga was very important for Hyrum. Hyrum had come to us later because he wanted to earn more money for his mission before joining us. While he flew to Tonga his luggage was lost and it took A MONTH before it actually got to him!
But that was perfect timing because in his luggage were his garments, and we went to get his living endowments in Tonga. What an incredible experience that was.
And although we made amazing friends and connections in Tonga, it was time to leave Tonga and join our boat that was now in Fiji.
Our boat was moored in Vuda Marina, which was a really unique marina that linked all the boats together instead of keeping them far from each other. It was really weird.
And now that we were in Fiji, we were experiencing a totally different culture.
Different (gorgeous) money:
And different clothes (we bought Sulus right away so we could wear them each week to church.)
Although I have briefly been to Fiji before and visited the Hindu temple there, I hadn’t realized that there are so many Indians here. The British took tons of Indians as indentured servants….well more like tricked them into slavery… so there are many Hindus and Muslims here, and they were encouraged historically to not intermarry with Fijians and they have their own language still. However, every Indian I’ve asked so far says they would not like to visit India!
However, Indian holidays are still celebrated here, so we had a feast on Diwali and had fun with henna as well
Eventually, we had our own holiday, Halloween. We were on a tiny island with a resort that was friendly to cruisers. All the cruisers put up a quarantine flag if they were giving out candy to trick or treaters, and we went around with our dinghy trick or treating to all the participating boats. IT WAS SO FUN!!! I will never forget this.
Because we were on a boat in the middle of no where, we had to get creative with our costumes. Abraham made a Hallow Night character from a pizza box and a sulu. I just put makeup on me and the other boys, but one cruiser was really creative with their frog mask, and after Halloween, she gave it to Abraham!
Fiji has not been quite as culturally educational as Tonga, but it has been incredible hoping island, going to all these resorts. However, we have learned more about navigation and how coral grows around islands....there’s always one side that has more coral than the other, and there’s always a “drop off point” that lead to deep water. THE WATER HERE IS CRYSTAL CLEAR!
Even though we’ve spent most of our time at resorts and uninhabited islands, we have experiences some culture, including some fire shows and cultural dances (where they mostly did Tahitian dancing, because, let’s face it: Tahitian dancing is the best.
And we also did a kava Savusavu ceremony where we gave them raw kava and they took us on a tour of their island and then let us go to the island where they filmed the movie Cast Away.
We went on hikes and acted out a few things from the movie, including being so excited about fire.
And hey, traveling to remote islands creates pretty cool memories.
