Homeschooling overseas

I just saw this this morning, a blog post from the SCM team about homeschooling overseas

https://simplycharlottemason.com/blog/homeschooling-overseas-with-the-charlotte-mason-method/

Hello Everyone,

The blog post about homeschooling overseas was incredibly timely for me. My family recently moved to the Middle East and are finally reaching a more comfortable layer of adjusting. 😉

Unfortunately, I realized that the materials I brought for homeschooling are simply not meeting our needs! In hindsight, I should have paid more attention to some of the red flags I was getting about style, materials, and our own feelings about it, but I had SO much else to focus on with trying to move that I simply chalked it up to me being nervous about more than I needed to be.

One of the reasons I liked using the other program was that it was fairly self-contained, and I wanted the “convenience” of not having to search endlessly for books, even though it wasn’t as “Charlotte-Mason” as I would have liked. Let me tell you, though, this is certainly not convenient now, lol.

I have considered using the SCM curriculum on and off for a while, and I wish now that I would have looked at it more. Anyway, here are some of my questions.

1) How difficult is it to get the books? We have fairly reliable internet access, so as much as I *love* physical books, digital copies are an option. And we have a couple of e-readers without backlit screens, for the sake of our eyes. Additionally, we still have access to our US library’s Overdrive, so that helps significantly. My daughter is 12, so we are looking more at chapter books. My son, though, is 4 and though we brought quite a few picture books (and other books), they now seem like so few. It seems that, as far as I can find, picture books are not common as ebooks (plus I really would prefer him not have that much screen time…). But he is still preschool aged, so we are not doing formal teaching through books at this time. (He certainly does a LOT of learning, though.) We are grateful to have access to a lending library (NOT common here), but it is, sadly, very small and takes us a good 45 minutes by car (one way, though construction makes it take much longer), so we can only go about once ever 3-4 weeks.

2) How centered around American History is the SCM Curriculum? With where we are in studying history, I’d like to start with Early Modern & Epistles. We are an American family, and while I know American history is important, we have a broad worldview, and I’d really like a broader focus on learning than having everything centered around one country. If it is primarily focused on American history, how easy is it to exchange the books to broaden the focus?

3) Does 3 hours sound like a reasonable estimate of time for the daily work? I added up the estimates for the History, Enrichment, and Individual Studies, and looking at the upper estimate, that’s what I came up with. While I know that doesn’t sound like much, my daughter attends a refugee school (where I teach) in the mornings, so her home learning takes place in the afternoons. While afternoon schooling is not ideal to either of us, we feel it is important for her to connect with our community and those we are serving here. It also helps her with language practice. However, as refugee children have typically missed out on educational opportunities, the learning itself does not meet my daughter’s academic needs, thus additional schooling is necessary.

4) If I understand correctly, the Individual Studies include math. However, we have been using Math-U-See from the beginning, so would it be easy enough to continue with that and simply skip the math in the Individual Studies book? Or use some of it as review? Any recommendations or shared experience with this?

Thank you so much for any help, advice, and information anyone may be able to offer!