News About The Greer Family

June 17, 2002: Holidays Have Started

Leaning Tower of Pisa

School is over and the heat has been turned up with daytime temperatures over 30C. Since our last Web update we have traveled from Palma de Mallorca, Spain across the Western Mediterranean Sea to Corsica. We spent three enjoyable weeks in Corsica exploring and completing school. From there we headed north to Marina di Pisa where we are currently located.

Marina di Pisa is located at the mouth of the Arno river. If you follow the river inland you first come to Pisa, where the Torre Pendente (i.e., the leading tower) is located. If you keep heading upriver, you then come to Florence.

Ponte Vecchio, Florence

We have been in Marina di Pisa for less than a week, but we have visited Pisa, enjoying not only the leaning tower, but the spectacular cathedral located less than 30 meters away. After a day of rest we then took the train to Florence and spent two days exploring the famous Tuscan city. For regular readers of our Web pages, David's diary has not been updated. He is spending time working on it and hopefully a big update will be ready by the end of June.

We continue to keep track of all of the traveling that we have done. Since late-October last year, we have spent more than eleven days at sea (i.e., more than 264 hours). We have traveled more than 1,500 nautical miles (more than 2,800 kilometres). For those that want all of the detail, you can view our complete travel log. Each line in the log tells the where and when we went from and to.

The School Year

Our biggest achievement is to finish the school year onboard Dragonsinger. It has been a real challenge for all of us to do school on the boat. Children and parents become students and teachers and sometimes the role changes place stress on all of us. But this has been balanced by the great living classroom that we have been able to experience as we have travelled. It is one thing to learn about Roman civilization. It is another to read about it in the morning and then go touch a 2,000 year-old Roman wall in the afternoon. We have all learned a lot about each other and in our shared learning environment. All five of us learn new and interesting things every day and we continue to do so, even if formal school is out. We are all happy to have the school year behind us.

We work with the Greater Vancouver Distance Education School who supply all of our school materials and three teachers who mark and watch over what we are doing on board Dragonsinger. We want to thank Steve Lott, David Anderson, and Suzie Mah, the three GVDES teachers who worked with us this year. You can learn more about the school and these three teachers at our school Web page.

At the end of term three, Karalee and David wrote a set of Web pages to each of the children's teachers. We have included links to these Web pages below. Each Web page also has lots of pictures of Jocelyn, Kevin, and Allen and examples of their school work.

Jocelyn's School Work

Standing On Top of the World in Bonifacio

Jocelyn has had a fantastic school year. She has been keen to learn and has integrated her school work into what she has seen and experienced. Nothing demonstrates this better than her Language Arts project in the third term. Jocelyn wrote a wonderful story called The Boat Ride. We encourage you to visit David's notes on Jocelyn's third-term progress and read The Boat Ride.

Kevin's School Work

Kevin Working On French

Kevin found home schooling a real challenge. It took a lot of creative thinking on the part of David and Karalee to keep Kevin motivated and moving ahead in all of his school work. This has paid off as not only has Kevin completed the school year, but according to his GVDES teacher, David Anderson, he was consistently among the first to complete material and return it to the school. All this despite the fact that mail delivery usually takes two weeks and in addition to doing school we have also done a lot of traveling and exploring. His school notes include a couple examples of art projects which Kevin had a lot of fun completing.

Allen's School Work

Final Day of School 2001/2002

Teaching Grade One requires an incredible amount of one-to-one teaching and it has been Karalee's job to be Allen's teacher this year. This intensive teaching does have its rewards. Allen has gone from being able to read short books with lots of pictures and few words to reading much longer books. One of his favourite books has been Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. Allen often starts his day by diving under the covers in the aft cabin and reading a book to Mom and Dad. Allen's biggest challenge has been to get used to writing. It has been a struggle to keep him motivated to write more and more. We have seen steady progress in his writing skills as the school year has progressed.

Itinerary

We have done well to cover as much distance as we have and complete a full school year with three children. We are now in cruising mode which means that we will balance seeing lots of new and interesting places with time to just hang out, relax, swim, and enjoy the Mediterranean. Below is our rough itinerary for the next several months. Viewed on a large scale map we plan to travel south from Marina di Pisa, Italy around the boot of Italy, up the Adriatic, visiting Croatia, then back south, around the boot once more and then head to Tunisia via either Malta or Sicily.

We plan to spend the winter in Tunisia and look forward to all sorts of new and interesting things to experience by living in a North African country. We are also investigating having Jocelyn, Kevin, and Allen attend a French school for one term (roughly January through March, 2003). Tunisia is a former French colony (they achieved independence in 1956). While an Arabic country today, French is still widely spoken.

June:	Elba, Rome, Naples, Italy
July:	Southern Italy and Croatia
August:	Croatia with a possible trip to Venice, Italy
September:	Adriatic Sea with a possible trip to Malta
October:	Arrive Monastir, Tunisia by the end of the month