Traveling During School

We have been doing some traveling lately and normally that would be a hard thing to do during a school year. Thankfully we’ve chosen to home school our children during this challenging time. I have to say it’s been quite wonderful, especially given the fact that we made an impromptu trip to Southern California. Here is how we dealt with traveling during school.

We decided to travel to Southern California last month for a few days. Just enough time to get away and be together as a family. However, we would be returning home on Columbus Day, a Monday, which we did not have off of school. So instead of skipping school I packed it with us.

If you haven’t read my previous post Top 5 Tips for Homeschool you should check it out. In there I have the 5 things that have helped me with this homeschool adventure so far. Among the post you’ll find an organizing solution that helped me so much while we were traveling during school.

Having a few days to plan out our trip, I made a lesson plan that would incorporate Columbus Day and be interactive for my kids to stay busy on the long drive home. Inside of our storage containers for school I made sure that they each had pencils, crayons, extra paper and their workbooks that would be necessary for their lessons. I also made a small notebook that they would use to make their own map for our journey home.

Routine is so important to children. It gives them a sense of stability. Because even in this uncertain time, they can count on some things being the same or similar day after day. Even though we happened to be traveling, I kept up with our routine and tried to make school on the road similar to how we do it at home.

We started the day off with an introduction to Columbus and why it’s a day that is recognized. After that I made it more interesting for them and we discussed the topic of explorers. I had them grab their notebook and I asked them what things they think an explorer might be looking for on their travels. We made topics on each page like: miles to home, landscape, wildlife, and stops made along the way.

We drew the state of California and charted a course for home. Next we used a map to find out the number of miles it would take for us to get there. Then we moved on to Language Arts until it was time to head home. One of the things we like to do for Language Arts is to draw a picture and write about it. The cool thing about vacation, or traveling during school, is that that there are so many things that you’ve done that you can draw and write about.

My older daughter loved the driving that we did. She drew a picture of our family in the car…it wasn’t quite realistic with a different compartment for each person. When I asked her about it she said “It’s my imaginary mom!”. You know what? I’ll take it. I’m glad she could incorporate her imagination into our trip. My younger daughter loved the beach so she drew her and myself at the beach. I’m pretty sure one of us was a mermaid. It was too cute.

After a while we headed home and began our explorer journals. As we were driving I had them look out the windows and tell me what they saw. They recorded it in their journals and labeled them. I also had them record each stop that we made. We looked at our map to see how many miles we had gone and how many we had left to go. We also tried to find one “cool” thing at each stop. Their favorite was finding dog paw prints in some mud. Of course we had to draw and label it as well.

We all had so much fun traveling during school. The kids felt like explorers and they were very entertained on the ride home which helps everyone. They were engaged for most of the drive and genuinely curious about the world around them. Our girls had so many questions about the things they saw. Thankfully we were able to answer them…I’m sure one of these days they will have some harder ones for us that we might have to look up.

Overall, I’d say that traveling during school was successful for our family. I was able to plan ahead to be able to bring the things that we needed and to make a fun and engaging activity that incorporated most of our subjects into one easy activity. I think the key to handling homeschool is to have fun with it. We have so many more opportunities than traditional school and we have the ability to really engage with our children and make a difference in the way that they learn. If your children see you enjoying the process of teaching, more than likely, they will enjoy the process of learning because you’ll both be having fun.