The World is Our Classroom – Inspiration for Parents

If you think active travel needs to wait until the children “are old enough,” Cindy Ross’s new book The World is Our Classroom is for you. Her inspiring story of how she and her husband used nature and travel to educate their children is filled with inspiration, tales of real-life adventures and plenty of practical advice on how you can do the same.

When children seemed about to interrupt Cindy’s career as a long-distance hiker — she wrote books on the subject, led expeditions and taught courses on it — she and her husband Todd decided to see if they could hike with a baby. Beginning with a “short” 60-mile hike when their daughter was 4 months old, they progressed to a 184-mile bicycle trip along the C&O Canal when she was 18 months old, and eventually to a 500-mile trek the length of the Colorado Trail when she was 3 and their son a year old.

These led to a Canada to Mexico trek with two small children and the gear carried by llamas, and began an odyssey and a way of life that would last until the children were through college — and beyond. From the American West they moved on to explore more of the world, living simply, traveling by foot and bicycle, always seeking ways to make their travels into learning opportunities.

Throughout their travels, they created a unique curriculum of hands-on experiences suggested by where they were. They were, as Cindy says, “teaching our children just by putting the world of nature in their path.”

As they continued their travels they took time to look at things — really look at them — like the rocks under their feet, wildflowers by the trailside, small animals they caught sight of in the woods. They carried field guides and began looking up answers to the inevitable questions. When the children were old enough they all walked, meanwhile the children rode in bicycle trailers or on the backs of llamas.

Not all of their unusual education took place far from home, although they spent two months on the trails each summer. When they were home, they relied on what was outside their door for entertainment, play and learning. On monthly moonlight walks by the full moon, they used binoculars to study the moon’s surface, learned about the earth’s rotation, answering questions about what they knew and looking up answers together when they didn’t. They created an organic process of education based on curiosity and experience. Biology, astronomy, weather and natural history were all a part of their play.

A covered wagon trip on the Oregon Trail, coupled with reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books brought history into their curriculum. They read contemporary journals as they traveled, comparing their experiences with those of pioneers who followed the same trail a century and a half before them. As they traveled by wagon and later by bicycle, they met Native Americans, learned to pan for gold and to use a bow and arrows.

Seeking out ethnic and historic festivals, they signed up for workshops and became student apprentices, learning skills that connected them to the past in ways reading a history book could never do. Living history experiences such as Renaissance fairs made history come alive.

Extending their scope to international destinations, they traveled by bicycle around Ireland and the Yucatan, even the Camino de Santiago; elsewhere they traveled by bus with locals, eating in neighborhood cafés or shopping at markets for simple do-it-yourself meals. Meanwhile the children went to public schools for seven years, traveling twice a year with the approval of the school administration and taking classwork with them to keep up with the classroom curriculum. They were speaking foreign languages and absorbing full-time travel experiences.

Eventually they morphed into home schooling, and selections from the children’s journals illustrate not only their experiences but what they learned from them, about acceptance of differences, self-reliance and appreciation for their own way of life. Each chapter ends with a “Nuts and Bolts” section with practical suggestions on how to adopt these ideas to your own lives.

Even for those not looking for ways to involve their children in the world around them, The World is Our Classroom is a good read, filled with her family’s real-life travel adventures.