Bilingual Education

Learning another language can be a way to broaden your child's horizons, either by taking your child to language classes or by hiring a native-speaking teacher, possibly rigging up a group of other interested kids to share costs.

If your child's goal is to learn a foreign language, but you don't have the flexibility for more schedules and appointments to meet, there are a number of self-study methods which teach or offer exposure to another language or culture, many of which have been devised for children. This also works well if you speak and/or understand that language well but feel that you want to separate your parenting role from that of being your child's teacher. You can still help your child by reading together, offering extra practice opportunities and explaining difficult areas without having the full job of teaching the language.

International Exams

There are a number of tests offered and/or recognized internationally that provide a measuring yardstick for a foreign degree that may not be recognized in the United States or Canada. Other tests are available for children reintegrating into the United States' schooling system, which provide valid learning assessments. Testing centers are offered in many cities throughout the world; the Internet and your country's consulate are excellent sources of information if you're already posted overseas.

If you're living in a foreign country and have school-aged children, bear in mind these two important timing considerations:

• If you know you're going to be in the foreign country for a set period of time, and you already know the town/city you'll be returning to at the end of that time, you'll need to contact that school district before your departure.
  
  Find out where your child needs to be, academically speaking, at the time of re-integration, and which resources are offered. Some schools offer online courses or have worked with children in similar situations in the past. If you opt against homeschooling, "patchwork solutions" discussed earlier may work well for you, because they allow your child to become integrated socially and linguistically in the culture where you are living, while preparing for a future in more than one country.
  
  Find out if a degree at the country you're moving to will be recognized in your home country. If not, ask which tests (international or at the reintegration school) your child can take at the end of that time frame, and purchase the books prior to departure if you have doubts about the international mailing system to the country you'll be living in.

• If you don't know how long you'll be gone or which city or country you'll eventually be moving to, you still need a long-term educational plan. Fiona Lhotka, a Canadian lawyer who's been living with her family in Mendoza, Argentina, has no immediate plans of going home. "My goal is to give my children a choice, and to make sure that the doors to their options stay open," she says. "My son is in eighth grade and goes to a Spanish/English bilingual school. He's taking geography and all the science subjects in English, while the rest of the subjects he's studying in Spanish. At the end of the next year he'll be writing his ICGSE (International Certificate of General Secondary Education) test. This will give admission offices a measuring yardstick for his progress since those exams are graded internationally, and carry more weight than an Argentinean certificate. If we're still here in a few years, he'll sit for his SAT's. There's no testing center in Mendoza, we'll probably go to Chile if we have to. But I want him to be able to go to university in Canada if that's his choice when the time comes."