Thinking Allowed: IGCSE

When we thought about out travels plans a year ago foremost in our minds was Aurora's education. Somehow as her grade levels creep higher and higher the responsibility of being her educator do too. We want our children to get to experience different ways of living but not necessarily at the expense of their future desires or lives. While we try our best to provide a decent education to our kids, proving that they have learned is much more of a challenge in a home school context. So, we came up with a compromise that Aurora seemed into as well. We would keep travelling but she would complete the IGSCE exams (International version of the British O level exams - think Harry Potter if you aren't British....) at the end of the year. In this way we would have internationally recognised and respected proof of Aurora's cleverness.

So here we are in Lima for six weeks for the long awaited and long prepared for exams. Regardless of her final grades, the entire process has been pretty great. I liked that Aurora got to choose what subjects she was interested in. I liked that I could encourage her to push herself further academically by choosing other topics too. It was useful having such a clearly defined goal to work towards. We all also agreed that the textbooks prepared by the exam board were easy to follow and better than the ones we had been using for the same subject. I feel that in this process Aurora has become very organised and on the ball about covering content and ensuring she completely understands it. Sophia, though not doing the exams, studied for two of them with Aurora and got a good sampler into high school subjects and the pros and cons of standardised testing. It is an intense six weeks of 16 exams (multiple exams per subject). Her subjects are Math, Physics, Chemistry, English, Geography, and Spanish). Our lives all revolve around the exam schedule pinned to the refrigerator. We are about halfway through and Aurora is holding up well, but, I can also see that she is looking forward to the end. Before each exam I tell her to 'have fun' and she gives me a smirk. Sounds funny, but, I do think we all have had fun through the IGCSE journey and have all learned a lot about the subjects, testing, independent studying, discipline, scheduling, British education system, co-working spaces in Lima, and a whole lot of other things.