Back In School: Da Nang, Vietnam — How We Educated Three Kids While Traveling the World

May 12, 2026

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MIKE & STACY TRAVELS ABROAD — BACK IN SCHOOL: DA NANG, VIETNAM
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<text x="120" y="560" font-family="Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif" font-style="italic" font-size="22" fill="#ffffff" opacity="0.78">how a multigenerational American family educated three kids across two countries.</text>

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<text x="120" y="848" font-family="Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif" font-style="italic" font-size="15" fill="#FFD400" letter-spacing="1">Choose Everywhere.</text>

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<text x="1480" y="848" text-anchor="end" font-family="Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif" font-size="12" fill="#ffffff" opacity="0.55" letter-spacing="3">DA NANG / VIETNAM</text>
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<h1 style="font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',sans-serif;font-size:44px;color:#0d3d1f;letter-spacing:-1.5px;line-height:1.1;margin:32px 0 8px 0;font-weight:900;">Back In School: Da Nang, Vietnam — How We Educated Three Kids While Traveling the World</h1>

<p style="font-family:Georgia,serif;font-style:italic;color:#666;font-size:16px;margin:0 0 40px 0;">Travel tips · Essentials · Real adventures</p>

<p><em>A quick note on the cast before we start, because this is the one post where it really matters: when we say “the kids,” we mean our three grandchildren — <strong>Liam</strong> (10), <strong>Kadyn</strong> (9), and <strong>Hadley</strong> (9). They’ve lived with us since day one of their lives. Their mom — our daughter <strong>Savannah</strong> — travels with us too. We’re a multigenerational American household. Sometimes we’re all under one roof, sometimes in two spaces side-by-side. Savannah works online. So do we. Sometimes the adults travel independently. But the household stays together. Always has. So “the kids” aren’t our kids in the parenting sense — they’re our family in the everyday sense, and they’ve been part of every country we’ve been to.</em></p>

<h2>The Decision: Homeschool Or Bust</h2>

<p>When all six of us decided to move abroad, one thing was clear within the first conversation: in-person schooling was going to be limited, hard to access in the places we wanted to go, and almost always shockingly expensive. International schools across Southeast Asia routinely cost $15,000 to $30,000 per child per year. Multiply that by three kids and you’ve priced yourself out of the lifestyle before the plane ticket is even booked.</p>

<p>So we made a different decision: we’d use our right as U.S. citizens to homeschool the kids, however we wanted, wherever we were.</p>

<p>We landed in Thailand on <strong>January 3rd, 2025</strong>. Liam was halfway through fourth grade. Kadyn and Hadley were halfway through third. We bought accredited, age-appropriate workbooks for the rest of the year — reading, writing, arithmetic, the basics — and divided subjects among the adults. Each of us took what we could teach best. Mike on one set. Stacy on another. Savannah filling in the rest.</p>

<p>That covered the “the 3 Rs in a book” part.</p>

<p>Then we did something a lot of homeschool families don’t: we let the country do the teaching.</p>

<h2>The Jungle Is Best Learned In The Jungle</h2>

<p>For ten months, our curriculum looked like this.</p>

<p>We learned about elephants by visiting elephant sanctuaries and learning to tell ethical sanctuaries from tourist traps. <a href="https://mikestacyabroad.com/blogs/pattaya-thailand/pattaya-elephant-sanctuary-review" style="color:#189E49;font-weight:600;">(We wrote a full review of the one we loved here.)</a></p>

<p>We learned about big cats and conservation by visiting tiger reserves — and also tiger parks, on purpose, so the kids could see and feel the difference between a place that protects animals and a place that exploits them. <a href="https://mikestacyabroad.com/blogs/pattaya-thailand/understanding-tiger-parks-what-they-teach-us-as-a-family-abroad" style="color:#189E49;font-weight:600;">(That one’s a hard but important read.)</a></p>

<p>We learned about monkeys by observing actual monkeys, multiple species, at close-but-not-too-close range. Field guide in one hand, sense-of-self-preservation in the other.</p>

<p>We visited rubber farms on Koh Chang and the kids saw where latex actually comes from. (Spoiler: it’s tree sap. They were both fascinated and slightly betrayed.)</p>

<p>We scuba dove off the coast of Koh Chang and Pattaya. The kids learned ecosystems by being in one.</p>

<p>We visited bird parks. Temples. The Sanctuary of Truth in Pattaya — an enormous all-wood temple carved with Hindu and Buddhist iconography that turned into an unexpected world religions lesson.</p>

<p>We accidentally walked into Nyepi in Bali and got a primer on Balinese Hinduism that no textbook could have delivered. <a href="https://mikestacyabroad.com/blogs/bali-indonesia/nyepi-bali-day-of-silence" style="color:#189E49;font-weight:600;">(Best educational accident of our lives.)</a></p>

<p>We even enrolled the kids in art classes in Pattaya, where they learned drawing techniques and used nature as their subject matter.</p>

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“The jungle is best learned in the jungle. Monkeys are best learned watching monkeys.
<span style="background:#FFD400;padding:2px 8px;display:inline-block;transform:rotate(-1deg);">Hinduism is best learned by accident.</span>”
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<p>For ten months, this was their school. Workbooks in the mornings. The world in the afternoons. Three kids, three adults, one shared mission: keep them learning, keep them curious, keep them growing.</p>

<p>And then, slowly, we started to notice something.</p>

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<h2>What The Kids Started Missing</h2>

<p>The novelty of the road is real. The depth of the road is real. But here’s the thing we couldn’t replicate no matter how hard we tried:</p>

<p>Other kids.</p>

<p>Specifically, other kids on a <em>consistent</em> basis. The same faces, day after day, week after week. The kind of friendship that gets built across hundreds of small repeated moments, not just hellos at an elephant sanctuary or shared snorkel gear on a dive boat.</p>

<p>Over time, we could see the wear. Liam, Kadyn, and Hadley weren’t unhappy — but they were missing something. Routine. Predictability. A schedule that wasn’t tied to our travel plans. The chance to be just-kids, in a classroom, with just-kids, on the days when the adults were — let’s be honest — tired of being teachers and parents and tour guides and travel agents all at once.</p>

<p>By the time we were planning the move to Vietnam, we knew the next chapter needed to be different.</p>

<h2>Finding The Learning Home in Da Nang</h2>

<p>What we wanted: a real school, close to where we’d be living, with proper enrichment programs, that wouldn’t bankrupt us, and that would let three siblings enroll together.</p>

<p>What we found: <a href="https://thelearninghomedanang.com/" style="color:#189E49;font-weight:600;" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The Learning Home</a>.</p>

<p>It was right in Da Nang. Easy to get to. Welcoming. The day ran a normal 8 AM to 3 PM schedule, with all the enrichment programs we knew the kids needed — the kind of stuff homeschool moms try to assemble on the road and never quite manage to.</p>

<p>And the cost? About <strong>$1,100 USD per month, total, for all three kids.</strong> That works out to roughly $367 per kid, per month, at a real school in a real city. We did the mental math against U.S. private school tuition (don’t even start with international school tuition) and almost cried.</p>

<p>We enrolled the kids in August 2025 — right as the Da Nang rainy season kicked in.</p>

<p>The timing turned out to be perfect.</p>

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“Three kids in a real international school for about
<span style="background:#FFD400;padding:2px 8px;display:inline-block;transform:rotate(-1deg);">$1,100 USD total per month.</span>”
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<h2>The Routine That Saved Us</h2>

<p>From August 2025 onward, life had a rhythm again.</p>

<p>The kids had school. They had teachers who weren’t their family. They had friends — real, consistent, see-them-tomorrow friends. They had structure. They had a place that was <em>theirs.</em></p>

<p>And we, the adults, had something we hadn’t had in nearly a year: <strong>uninterrupted working hours during the day.</strong> Savannah’s remote work, our own work — all of it suddenly had the kind of focused time it needed. The household exhaled.</p>

<p>The rainy season settled in. The kids settled in. Mike and Stacy and Savannah settled in. For the first time since leaving the States, it felt like a normal life — just one that happened to be lived in Vietnam.</p>

<p>That routine, and the friendships the kids built at The Learning Home, carried us through our entire Vietnam chapter — including, eventually, a much harder chapter the family went through a few months later. <a href="https://mikestacyabroad.com/blogs/travel-stories/menopausal-in-vietnam" style="color:#189E49;font-weight:600;">(That one’s a different story.)</a> But the kids’ days were anchored. They had a place to go. They had people who knew them. That mattered.</p>

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<div style="font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12px;letter-spacing:4px;color:#FFD400;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:12px;">— IF YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT THIS LIFE WITH KIDS —</div>

<h2 style="font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;font-size:38px;font-weight:900;color:#ffffff;letter-spacing:-1.5px;line-height:1.1;margin:0 0 8px 0;">What We’d Tell Another Family</h2>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-style:italic;font-size:18px;color:rgba(255,255,255,0.85);margin-bottom:32px;">Multigenerational household. Three kids. Two countries. Here’s the playbook.</div>

<p style="margin:0 0 18px 0;"><strong style="color:#FFD400;">You can homeschool legally as U.S. citizens, from anywhere in the world.</strong> No school district needs to approve your trip. Buy accredited workbooks before you go, divide subjects among the adults in your household, and you have a curriculum on day one.</p>

<p style="margin:0 0 18px 0;"><strong style="color:#FFD400;">The country is a curriculum.</strong> Field trips aren’t a supplement to learning — in this lifestyle, they’re half the lesson plan. Elephant sanctuaries teach biology. Temples teach religion. Markets teach economics. Tiger parks teach ethics. The kids retain more from a day at a sanctuary than a week at a desk.</p>

<p style="margin:0 0 18px 0;"><strong style="color:#FFD400;">Watch for the “they need other kids” signal.</strong> It will come. It won’t be one big breakdown — it’ll be a slow, low-grade ache for routine and peers. Don’t ignore it. It’s real, and it’s the cue to pivot.</p>

<p style="margin:0 0 18px 0;"><strong style="color:#FFD400;">Affordable international schools exist in Southeast Asia.</strong> The big-name international schools are eye-wateringly expensive. But smaller, local-international schools and bilingual schools often run a fraction of the cost. We paid roughly $1,100/month for three kids at <a href="https://thelearninghomedanang.com/" style="color:#FFD400;font-weight:700;" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The Learning Home in Da Nang</a>. That math doesn’t exist in the United States.</p>

<p style="margin:0 0 18px 0;"><strong style="color:#FFD400;">Match the school start to the rainy season if you can.</strong> Wet weather is the universe’s permission slip to be indoors. Settling kids into a new school the same week the rain starts is a quiet superpower.</p>

<p style="margin:0 0 18px 0;"><strong style="color:#FFD400;">If you’re a multigenerational household: lean on it.</strong> Three adults dividing teaching duties beats one parent trying to do it all. It also beats hiring help. Grandparents who travel with grandkids have an advantage every other family-of-five quietly envies.</p>

<p style="margin:0 0 0 0;"><strong style="color:#FFD400;">It’s okay to switch modes.</strong> Homeschool isn’t permanent. International school isn’t permanent. Online curriculum isn’t permanent. The mode follows the country. The country follows the family. The family follows what the kids need.</p>

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<h2>What This Has Taught The Kids (And Us)</h2>

<p>Ten months of jungle classroom, followed by nine months of real-school routine in Vietnam, taught Liam, Kadyn, and Hadley things we couldn’t have built into any curriculum back home.</p>

<p>They know what ethical animal tourism looks like, because they’ve seen the other kind right next to it.</p>

<p>They know that latex grows on trees and rice grows in flooded fields, because they’ve stood in both.</p>

<p>They know what a temple feels like at sunrise, what a coral reef sounds like underwater, what gamelan music does to a crowd at midnight.</p>

<p>They know how to make friends in a country where they don’t speak the language — because they had to.</p>

<p>And they know that learning isn’t a building. It’s a posture. School is a tool you pick up when it’s the right tool. Homeschool is a tool you pick up when it’s the right tool. The world keeps teaching either way.</p>

<p>As for us — Mike, Stacy, Savannah — we learned that a multigenerational household isn’t a sacrifice. It’s a strategy. Three adults raising three kids across two countries with one shared curriculum and zero burnout is not a luxury most families plan for. But it should be.</p>

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<h2>Where We Are Now</h2>

<p>As of April 2026, the household is in <strong>Albania</strong>. The Mediterranean is gentle. The pace is slow. The kids have a different rhythm again, and we’re figuring out the next education chapter as we go — just like we did in Thailand, just like we did in Vietnam. The mode always changes. The mission doesn’t.</p>

<p>If you’re a family — or, especially, a multigenerational family — thinking about doing this with kids in tow, this is the part we want you to hear:</p>

<p><strong>You can.</strong> You don’t need to be rich. You don’t need to be young. You don’t need an international school budget. You don’t need to split the family up. You need a plan, the right to homeschool (you have it as a U.S. citizen), an open mind about what counts as a school day, and the willingness to switch modes when the kids tell you it’s time.</p>

<p>The world is patient. The kids are watching. And the curriculum is right outside the door.</p>

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“A multigenerational household isn’t a sacrifice.
<span style="background:#FFD400;padding:2px 8px;display:inline-block;transform:rotate(-1deg);">It’s a strategy.</span>”
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<div style="font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12px;letter-spacing:4px;color:#FFD400;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:16px;">— PLANNING THIS LIFE WITH YOUR FAMILY? —</div>

<h2 style="font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;font-size:40px;font-weight:900;color:#ffffff;letter-spacing:-2px;line-height:1.05;margin:0 0 24px 0;">
Visa rules matter
<span style="display:inline-block;background:#FFD400;color:#0d3d1f;padding:2px 12px;transform:rotate(-1deg);font-style:italic;">even more with kids.</span>
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<p style="font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:18px;line-height:1.6;color:rgba(255,255,255,0.9);max-width:620px;margin:0 auto 36px auto;">
Every country handles family visas, school enrollment, and dependents differently. We keep a free directory of every country’s official government visa page so you can verify the rules for your whole household before you book.
</p>

<a href="https://mikestacyabroad.com/pages/office-government-visa-info" style="display:inline-block;font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-weight:700;letter-spacing:2px;text-transform:uppercase;color:#0d3d1f;background:#FFD400;padding:16px 32px;text-decoration:none;border-radius:4px;">
Open the Free Visa Directory →
</a>

<div style="font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11px;letter-spacing:3px;color:#FFD400;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:12px;">AND IF YOU’RE PLANNING A LIFE, NOT JUST A TRIP</div>

<h3 style="font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;font-size:26px;font-weight:900;color:#ffffff;letter-spacing:-1px;line-height:1.2;margin:0 0 16px 0;">The Global Travel Tracker</h3>

<p style="font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:16px;line-height:1.6;color:rgba(255,255,255,0.85);max-width:560px;margin:0 auto 28px auto;">
A 9-tab spreadsheet covering all 197 countries — Schengen days, visa tracking, budgets, packing, and more. Built for families like ours who plan a year ahead, not a trip ahead.
</p>

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<div style="font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11px;letter-spacing:4px;color:rgba(255,255,255,0.5);font-weight:700;margin-bottom:8px;">MIKE & STACY TRAVELS ABROAD</div>
<div style="font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-style:italic;font-size:22px;color:#FFD400;letter-spacing:-0.5px;">
Choose <span style="background:#FFD400;color:#0d3d1f;padding:1px 8px;display:inline-block;transform:rotate(-1deg);">Everywhere.</span>
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