All around the world (part 1)
Interview with Shira Greenspan, educator, parent and world-record setting virtual traveller
Welcome to the tenth edition (part1) of “On, Off, All the Time”!
Intro (for first-time readers, otherwise feel free to skip)
This newsletter is dedicated to fellow parents, grandparents, teachers and anyone else involved in caring for kids, who wake up stressing out about having to come up with a healthy balance of on and off-screen activities to keep children educated, entertained and safe.
For many of us, this responsibility (especially these days) exists literally all the time, at least until our kids are shipped off to boarding school, college or Hogwarts :)
Today it is my pleasure to feature an EPIC interview with Shira Greenspan, who recently launched @HomeByBedtime, to share her family’s virtual adventures around the 🌍 throughout the pandemic.
Shira is an award-winning educator, artist and one of the coolest parents I have ever met. 👩🎨👩🏫
As you will see shortly, her family project is so insanely ambitious and creative that I chose to dedicate two back-to-back issues (next one coming out in a few days) so we can dive into all the fun details!
Interview with Shira Greenspan, educator, parent and world-record setting virtual traveller
Yaakov: Hey, Shira! Thanks so much for agreeing to join us today. Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?
Shira: My pleasure! Thanks for having me.
So my main background is an educator and artist. I have worked for over a decade in education in the US and Israel (where we live now). My greatest fulfilment, however, comes from learning with my husband and three children. 👫👦👦👧
Yaakov: Thanks, Shira. Can you start by sharing the story behind your virtual traveling? How did it develop?
Corona Era has asked a lot of each of us.
In my case, I was trying to be the kind of mom who successfully kept up her kids’ norms during a time and in an environment that was anything but normal. I felt so much failure every time we didn’t complete a school assignment, and anxiety to make every Zoom lesson a positive learning experience for my kids. I tried to juggle all of my children’s different needs and interests. I tried to be that mom.
But I’m not the academically organized, preppy manager-mom. I’m the mom who is a creative educator. I am the mom who believes in project-based and real-world learning.
So I finally chose to stop trying to be the mom I’m not and lean into the person I am.
That’s when @HomeByBedtime was born. It’s been 4 months since I anguished over a Zoom class; we haven’t looked back since.
So now we virtual-travel nearly every day. One of the ways I know that this approach is working for me is that, while I’m still absolutely exhausted at the end of each day, it’s a fulfilled exhaustion, not a drained one. It’s the kind of exhaustion that comes from using all of your energy reserves towards something meaningful. 🥱🤗
Yaakov: How many countries have you done so far?
Shira: We have been to nearly 60 countries which isn’t even half of the countries in the world! 🤯
Yaakov: So what is the preparation process like?
Shira: As with any travelling, there are 3 key steps in the preparation process: choosing your destination, research, and, ultimately, developing an itinerary.
How do we choose where to go? 🧭
The criteria vary. It started off based around which Disney movies I wanted to watch and building each day’s itinerary around the setting of the movie. Our first visit was to Alaska where we watched “Brother Bear.” “Mulan” in China and “Coco” in Mexico followed soon after. Then my kids started making requests, and their enthusiasm became the criteria for choosing each destination. We’ve come so far that now we’re motivated by the goal of visiting every country on Earth. 🚌🌏
Yaakov: Wow, that would probably set a world record for virtual trips, incredible! How do you research the features and opportunities of each destination?
My biggest source of information is reading “fun fact” blogs about each of the countries. I learn so many interesting things and often it is through the eyes and voices of people literally on the ground there. 🔎
My driving curiosities when I set out to research a new destination are:
- What sets this place apart? 📜
- How would locals want their home to be seen by outsiders? 🏠
- What are points of interest within or regarding our destination that will help my family relate to its people and causes rather than feel “other?” 📍
Yaakov: How do you make such detailed and fun itineraries while ensuring that your children learn something new each day?
So before making a concrete @HomeByBedtime itinerary I found it is best that we first set the big educational goals for the day. 🏫🥅
What can we experience in this place to further develop our academic skills and our sense of global citizenship? I find it helpful to work backwards for this. I have my own mental list of goals and then decide which of them are most appropriate to build into our day. Here are some examples:
- The word “Morocco” has the letter O three times, making a different sound each time. What word features help us identify long and short vowel sounds? 🕬
- Cape Town, South Africa faces water shortage. What can we do to conserve water? 🚰
- Solomon Islands is threatened by rising ocean levels. What can we do to preserve the ancestral stories of ancient peoples? 🌊
With the research and essential questions in mind, it’s time to plan. 👩🏫
How does the research become a concrete itinerary? I consider different projects, neighborhood outings, games… anything that can offer an experience of an element of that location.
Here’s a good example: Brazil is famous for its rainforests and, unfortunately, the deforestation of the Amazon. How could my young children connect to a distant and abstract idea? We went to the local forest and cleaned up all of the trash we found. 🌳🚯
Once I’ve brainstormed, it’s time for lists. 📔
Lists Phase 1 is developing the actual itinerary for each day. I try to make this list longer than is actually necessary so that my kids have more choice in what to do in each place we visit. That then leads into Lists Phase 2 which involves grocery lists, supply lists, and lists for further research. 🛍️
The ultimate @HomeByBedtime itinerary that my kids see is more of a list than a schedule. The consistent components of our day keep things structured enough. The list I give my kids communicates which things are “together activities,” which are “mandatory activities,” etc. 👨👩👧👦
People often see my social media posts and marvel at how much we pack into a day. But it’s important to know that, more often than not, there are several activities taking place simultaneously depending on the age and interests of each of my kids.
Yaakov: That’s a lot of work!
Shira: Yes, it is. But doing work that speaks to my interests and passions doesn’t really count as work, right? 😍
And some days aren’t as work-intensive. When we went to Sweden, for example, we just spent the day at Ikea.
Yaakov: What does your daily routine look like?
Shira: While each day is obviously different, the routine below helps structure the day. We try to follow it for every place we visit:
Every morning starts with our imaginary flight to our new destination. ✈️
Aboard the plane we pray, eat breakfast, learn Torah (Jewish religious studies), and review the day’s itinerary. Then we follow the same intro to each destination each day, reviewing relevant facts (see photo below).
We’ve added other components to each morning’s introduction such as learning 10 new words (our favorites are looking up the meaning of our names in the country’s main language), inventing a Pokémon for this geography and climate, and playing the weather game (with only a world map for reference, guess the weather and temperature in today’s destination (my son invented this activity and I absolutely love it!)). 🌡️📚
This brings us to around 8:00. We begin the day’s special activities.
At around 10:30 we have an early lunch, do around 2 more activities and then watch the day’s feature film (this is also when my youngest naps, giving me a blessed 2 hours to myself). When the movie is over, my awake kids do what they call “movement” (exercising together) and then each get about 20 minutes to play on the iPad.
This brings us to around 14:00. We enjoy the rest of the day’s activities.
At around 17:00 it’s time for the return flight home. We reflect on the day over dinner.
Yaakov: Are you concerned that your kids aren’t learning the school material (mathematics, science, etc.) during this time?
Shira: Do you know what? When drawing from real-world life and experiences, it’s impossible NOT to learn things like math and science.
When we went to Switzerland (a country famous for its time pieces), my five-year-old finally learned how to tell time, not as a formal academic unit, but it was a learning opportunity that naturally flowed from his experiences. ⌚
We did color theory experiments and painting techniques when we went to Russia and learned about the work of Wassily Kandinsky. We built a solar-powered rover and tested it in our pretend Atacama Desert in Chile. My kids are learning tons! And educational research has found this kind of real learning creates significantly more neural connections, leads to greater application of skills and knowledge, and has so many other benefits.
Yaakov: So it’s like a modified form of traditional learning?
Shira: I think it’s just learning. There are features of traditional models that work well and so we take advantage of them and there are features of progressive models that work well and so we take advantage of those, too.
But I will say that traditional learning typically follows a model of a) acquiring knowledge and skills and then, b) being assessed on the level of attainment of said knowledge and skills. What more progressive models do is, on a most basic level, flip this so that the goal is what drives the entire learning process from the outset. @HomeByBedtime strives for this flipped model. 🙃
Yaakov: Can you give an example?
Instead of saying, “Let’s learn how to write, let’s learn how to understand currency value, let’s learn how to cook pasta,” and then, once those pieces are mastered, introducing a fun culminating project like, “Let’s open a pretend Italian restaurant,” I’m flipping it. I’m saying to my kids, “We’re in Italy! Let’s open a pretend Italian restaurant. What do we need to learn in order to do this successfully?” 🍝
Yaakov: Aren’t your kids different ages and, presumably, capable of different things? How are you keeping them all engaged and learning?
Shira: That’s such a great question. Before we started virtual-traveling, my expectations for my kids’ engagement and learning was quite low and there were few meaningful activities that we all enjoyed together.
But just as real family travel meets various needs and interests through a cohesive family experience, our days have grown to near-constant engagement and learning.
In the Italy example, each child was engaged in a way that was appropriate for them. My toddler was learning how to set a table and fold a napkin; my preschooler was following directions for cooking the pastas and practicing letter formation by writing the menus; my oldest was exercising managerial skills and calculating pricing of dishes based on the costs of ingredients. 🧮🏷️
They were each doing their own thing but they were all engaged in the unified activity of opening a restaurant (and giggling as they pronounced pasta names in their Italian accents).
Yaakov: What has the response been since you started sharing your travels?
Shira: Overwhelming (in the best way!). I am grateful for the outpouring of support and interest because it helps keep my motivation high to take the time to share all of this work. 😃
The best feedback is hearing from natives of the countries who are impressed with and proud of the way @HomeByBedtime is representing their home countries. 🗺️
Our virtual travels were inspired in a big way by friends of ours who spent their days in lockdown doing virtual travel. As a result of the example set by these friends and since launching @HomeByBedtime, more and more people are sharing how they’ve taken on this project with their own families. It’s incredible!
I also especially appreciate hearing from families who were frustrated with their routine (or non-routine) and found these resources to be as transformative for themselves as it has been for us. ✨
They share that their kids are discovering that they have the power to act and influence the world around them. They’re critically developing and evaluating what values are important to them. They are challenging ignorance and developing tolerance. They are discovering that their voice and their actions have a place in this world.
Conclusion
Thanks for that, Shira, seriously incredible stuff! Looking forward to sharing Part 2 of our interview where we discuss how tech helps you in your journeys and what you are planning to do when you run out of countries. 🤔💡
In the meantime, follow @HomeByBedtime on Instagram to join Shira and her family on their daily adventures! 🛺
And of course, if you haven’t already, please click 👇 to subscribe to “On, Off, All the Time” and get fresh, and interesting ‘ideas for kids’ each week! 🙏