On this page you’ll find our favorite✈️Travel 🎓Education and tools from the last last decade plus of home schooling and world schooling!
✈️Travel
These are our favorite tools for simplifying and saving money while traveling. Be sure and check out our blog for helpful tips on maximizing their value!
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We've used dozens of online travel agencies to find accommodations all over the world. Over time booking.com has come back as consistently one of the best so it has become our goto!
Many places in Asia do not have Uber or Lyft. There are alternatives but we found Grab to be the easiest to use and it is also widely accepted and cheaper than taxis, making finding a ride much easier.
We've used Airalo e-SIM for mobile phone data in a dozen countries as it's inexpensive, easy to set-up, and top-off. If you buy a regional or global plan, your data carries over to your next destination!
Super lightweight, easy to use currency conversion tool. Simply search for and add the country to the top of your list and get real time currency conversions. Super handy when you first arrive to ensure you're getting a reasonable deal at the money conversion kiosks.
We find that you can usually get by anywhere in the word with a few words and some illustrative hand gestures, but when you need a little more horsepower it's helpful to have a translator handy. Also nice that you can speak into it or put it in transcribe mode for things like church services when they're in another language!
According to my ladies, this is one of the best things in our carry-ons! It saves you when you're in a less than sanitary bathroom situation because you can pee standing up and just rinse it off!
We tend to travel using one way tickets and then when it comes time to book the next location, we use Google Flights to explore options for cheap flights to nearby destinations!
If we can, we always stay with locals. We enjoy having a whole place to ourselves and getting to know the people where we are. Inevitably we have a much richer experience than staying in a hotel. We also find that AirBnB's are priced below similarly furnished hotels.
For accommodations in Asia, you cant beat Agogda.com. Not only do they consistently have the lowest prices, but they have cash back and a reward program. So if you're planning on a trip to Asia, save yourself some time and book with Agoda!
We've been world schooling since 2022 and when we're on the road we use Safety Wing's month-to-month coverage in case of emergencies.
The virtual mail service we've used since 2002 to receive and scan our snail mail to our email inbox! Optionally forward mail and packages anywhere in the world! Use our referral code to get one month free! DON-KVHBSO9Z.S4T
We use Mint Mobile to park our U.S. phone numbers. It's affordable, covers us in the U.S., and supports Wi-Fi calling abroad, allowing us to text, use WhatsApp, and handle two-factor authentication without switching SIMs or updating contacts. Try it and get a $15 credit!
We used this app to digitize all our photos and documents before we began our full time travels. We still use it as needed to easily create high quality PDF files!
This book was such a life changing read that we spoke about it episode 1 of our podcast! In it, we learned how to minimize our lives well before we began traveling. But, as full time travelers who live out of suitcases, we use what we've learned every day!
🎓Education
These are all tools that we are in various stages of using as our three kids each have two years between them. Our foundation on every subject is based on the classical method of learning which is absolutely phenomenal! I was skeptical when my four year old was learning her times tables in song form. But my skepticism turned into believe when she not only knew them, but understood how to use them in problem solving!
The classical method of education helped us set a really solid foundation of knowledge in every subject; we really enjoy the Cross Seven classical curriculum. Try it for four weeks free below!
Christian Light math does an amazing job of keeping topics fresh as you progress and has a lot of creative, classical, globally diverse, visual methods for teaching and reinforcing advanced math (algebra, geometry) from early on!
Brash Cards reinforces everything we learned from grammar books we used to do called Grammar For The Well Trained Mind which is an excellent program but it’s very difficult.
For History we do Story of the World which uses the classical method to help them to re acall ll the world's major events from creation to modern day. Far richer than the U.S. history we get growing up.
We absolutely love the Bible Project reading plan. The videos and articles are engaging adn they're absolute gold when it comes to helping build a deep and fulfilled understanding of God's word.
We use Google Drive as free alternatives to Microsoft Word, Power Point, and Excel. We store our documents on Drive so we can access them from any device, even if offline.
English is basically a combination of Latin (ancient Spanish) and German. Given this, the Language Transfer method helps you apply a few rules that give you instant access to thousands of words you already know. i.e. confirmation (english) = confirmacion spanish)= confirmar (to confirm in spanish) = confirmo (I confirm)!
We use low cost, lightweight google chrome books for our kids school computers and we use Google Families parental controls to help keep them out of trouble with all the social media nonsense that's out there!
Hoopla connects to your library card and gives you instant access to e-books, audiobooks, movies on demand and more!
We use study.com to earn dual high school and college credit, which allows our kids to take regionally accredited college courses that can transfer to over 15,000 colleges and universities. Using this approach Tre, our oldest, will be able to graduate college when he would have normally graduated high school!
For English we like IEW because it breaks down writing papers easily using a set methodology.
As a result of daily practice, the kids can identify every country in the world and draw the world from scratch. Pretty handy when you’re a world traveler!
We like the Bible Memory app for scripture memorization. You can practice up to 50 verses with the free plan.
Nitro Type is a simple online racing game where you can earn cool looking cars while learning to type faster. Between Nitro Type and Typing.com our oldest can now type 100 words per minute!
The kids create quizlets to reinforce their learning and to keep key concepts fresh. A great habit to help with college down the line! Oftentimes you can search and find quizlets that other people have created.
We use Duolingo daily so we're making consistent baby steps towards language learning. Right now we're all learning Spanish!
We used 1 Dollar Scan to digitize our three kid's school materials for just $40! Its about $1 per 100 pages vs the 25¢ per page elsewhere.
We've homeschooled using a mix of materials for more than a decade, but have switched to Easy Pease All-in-One Homeschool because its free and it has everything we need!
Some of these links are affiliate products, they help keep us on the road! If you purchase a product or service with the links that I provide I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge to you!