Living and Learning on the Road

On our first big trip last winter, we brought all the homeschooling stuff and quickly realized it was too much. For kids gone into vacation mode and who are learning organically, it was a battle every day to check my beloved boxes, and not worth the relationship struggles.

Or next big trip was to Maine in the fall. I brought none of our standard curriculums, thinking we’d go the Unschooling route and see where I took us. There was a great deal of delight directed learning with what we were seeing. We did journaling every day and while there was a lot of learning happening, I found that we needed more structure (and this was reinforced by our reentry into homeschooling when we returned home- that was welcomed without complaint by all three of these kiddos!).

This trip I decided that a healthy medium was in order. I brought phonics and reading programs, as well as grammar for the twins, and Hope brought math, grammar, and spelling. On top of their own work on those subjects, as a family we do memory work, Bible, current events, geography, history, and composition that correlates to our literature curriculum (which gives us handwriting as well!). It sounds like a lot, but is probably half of what we do at home (no science or art curriculums here- that all happens organically!) which leaves us lots of time to explore, check out local attractions (which often turns out to be a lot of learning!), read, and play!

Here are some of our recent local field trips that lead to lots of book research and investigation when we returned home for the night!

This was a trip to Bok Tower gardens where we learned about Florida fauna and heard one of the most amazing Carillon Concerts! We researches bell towers and learned so much from a talk from the resident Carilloneur.

We made lemonade from lemons that looked suspiciously like Portuguese Man’oWar. When our swimming day at the beach was purple flagged, we enjoyed shelling and sand play, and we used the opportunity to learn that the Man’oWar is not classified as a jellyfish! We read up on them and found out about their stings and how to treat them, and lots of other wonderful facts!

After a trip to the Lakeland Children’s Museum where we spent the day learning about the life of the orange in Florida to a few trips to groves to learn and observe washing and prepping oranges for shipment, we learned about Florida’s citrus! We toured groves to see the new hybrids and to smell the blossoms, had orange races, and sampled different varietals!