This is something that took me a while to convince myself of – that traveling to a new spot with my kids could count as educational, even when I wasn’t being intentional about teaching them how to calculate mileage or how to spell the name of a new city.
There is a certain type of confidence that comes from navigating new places successfully, usually WITH your parents or guardians, but sometimes given the freedom to learn some of it on your own. Can they push the button for the elevator in a hotel? Can they help you remember which way you came into the shopping mall? Can they figure out the start of the line for the amusement park ride?
These are life skills, and being in a new setting is a good place to practice observing and learning what to do in foreign situations. You are modeling for them the attitudes and behaviors of an explorer! Especially if none of you have been to this destination before!!!
OK… now that we’ve cleared the air and established the justification for counting TRAVEL days as “giant field trips,” I will give you a few tips to bring academics INTO a traveling situation. But don’t beat dead horses here. Make sure you are enjoying the trip, and not turning everything into homework. Nothing is more annoying than a homeschool family who has to make the entire trip into a report-writing assignment. Be a family on vacation, first and foremost!!
- Teach map skills, using paper maps, atlases, or the GPS on a smart phone. This can be done ahead of time, or while you are along for the ride (usually NOT a good job for the driver), or after you have arrived at your destination. If you are attending a large park or zoo, print a PDF map ahead of time and use it to show them the “lay of the land.” And Google Earth can be a fun way to explore ahead of time too, from several different perspectives.
- Interpret history for them. Why are those specific landmarks there? Which people group settled in this area? Were there battlefields nearby? Who fought those wars? If there is a museum in the neighborhood (or that you will be driving past), stop for a few hours to explore and learn together.
- Make science more real. This will be more interesting if you are in a part of the country that is different from where you live. Why is this area more mountainous? Where does this river go? What types of plants grow in this climate? Which animals find homes in this habitat? Several of these questions will make Environmental or Earth Science so much easier to teach down the road if you just NOTICE and comment on it while you are there.
- Famous Persons. Did anyone famous come from this area? If so, are there museums about them? What are they famous for doing? Is there a biography you can read ahead of time that will make their life more familiar to you when you arrive?
Allow me to give you a few real life examples from my own childhood travels.
- My parents took me on a train ride in Colorado, and then arranged for us to visit a marble quarry while we were there. I had never seen the mountains before, and traveling through MILES of dark tunnels helped me understand more about that era in transportation of railroad building. And I used my souvenir money to buy a small box with several types of rocks in it, which I still have to this day. My study of rocks and minerals in school made so much more sense to me after that.
- Our trip to California astounded me because the weather was SO nice in November! We got to visit Disneyland on Thanksgiving Day, when crowds were thin, and I learned more about airplane travel when our return flight was almost diverted to a different city because of a blizzard.
- When we went to Pennsylvania, I was able to see Independence Hall for myself, as well as the Liberty Bell, which I had read about previously. We were also able to spend an afternoon at The Franklin Institute which was the best museum I had ever been to because it was all hands on. On that same trip, I was able to experience the Atlantic Ocean and feel the power and saltiness of the waves as I tried to wade out into the water.
And some examples from our own family’s travels (now that I’m the mom)….
- We drove around Lake Superior, which included almost a week in Canada. We were on the lookout for moose the whole time, but were disappointed. The setting for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, The Song of Hiawatha, is the southern shores of Lake Superior, so we bought an illustrated book in a gift shop to help us get a better feel for the famous literary work. Our many stops at scenic waterfalls along the way helped us grasp the difference in geography from our own part of the country, and our glass-bottom boat tour showed the many remains of ship-wrecks along the coast.
- Our trip to South Dakota included many references to Little House on the Prairie, which we had studied the year before in our homeschool studies. We spent two nights in De Smet and watched the annual pageant which brought one of the books to life before our eyes. We also headed all the way to Wyoming (the kids were desperate to add another state to their tally on this trip); we visited Devil’s Tower, which may have been the core of an ancient volcano, and we narrowly missed a large snake which was hiding beneath a rock where we stopped to rest on our trip around its base.
- Driving to and from Washington, D. C. was a LONG trip from Iowa, but once there, we encountered MANY monuments and museums that tied in with American History. We also learned to navigate the Metro which was entirely unlike our forms of travel at home. We took advantage of sights along the way, including a toy tractor museum, and a stop in a cemetery to look for the graves of our ancestors.
Not every trip has to be over-the-top! There are several places you can visit closer to home on a day-trip if you don’t have time for a lengthy vacation. Look on your state’s travel website to see the destinations that tourists would visit if they came to your region. Exploring what makes YOUR state unique helps kids slowly grasp more about their own state’s history, and helps them learn the stories that surround their home.
And don’t neglect the power of a family camping trip. Spending a night or two in a state park, sleeping in a tent and cooking over a fire, can also be a valuable getaway for your family during the summer. Kids can learn life-skills, review survival skills, navigate using a compass, start a fire, and pitch a tent. Often state parks have access to playgrounds, hiking trails, small beaches, and even canoes to rent. All of these are out-of-the-ordinary experiences for impressionable minds, and will fill everyone’s collective memory with indelible impressions that will become part of your family jokes and folklore.
An important reminder for parents….Your attitude plays a HUGE role in any adventure. Even if you aren’t a planner, take some time to prep and reset your expectations (most likely LOWER!!). In our family we talk about being in “Vacation Mode” and we always pack extra snacks so that we don’t get hangry with each other. Talk together about some places you would like to visit and how you might add some type of adventure into each year, but don’t despair if you can’t afford a big vacation every summer. For twenty years, we’ve talked about taking our family to Maine, and it finally happened last summer. But our grown children have now visited Luxembourg, Kazakhstan, Japan, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ireland, and MANY places in the United States without us. You can equip your children with trip-planning abilities and watch them become adventurers themselves, all on the path to life-long learning!
Leave a Reply