Homeschool and travel go hand in hand for many reasons. Flexibility in schedule being a huge reason we love to homeschool. Being able to travel when everyone else is in school is very beneficial (less crowds, cheaper accomodations). If we want to take a week off school while we travel, we do. If we want to take some of school with us we have that ability as well.
I am a BookShark Brand Ambassador and did receive curriculum in exchange for sharing details of their product.
We usually take some of our school work with us when we travel and use some of our down time on our trip to make some progress with school. My son enjoys reading and both of my kids love being read to, so its a great chance to continue the learning.
What we take and how much school work we carry with us varies on how long we will be gone and how we are traveling. Road trips for a week will have me packing a few more books and flying somewhere for 3 days will be a much lighter book load.
Our homeschool curriculum, BookShark, comes with the amazing instructor guides to show what book and pages to read for each day of the school week. But when we are getting ready to travel we don’t stick with this quite as strictly as we do the rest of the school year. Besides, they named it guide, not rules. We may work ahead in some books while completely leaving others at home to work on when we return. The most beautiful part of homeschooling while traveling is that you get to adjust it so it is best for your family!
BookShark Binder
We purchase all the subjects from BookShark. (And I sing praises that I don’t have to piece together a curriculum every year.) Any parent that has done this knows, putting all of those subjects into the binder makes for a BIG book. Since carrying around Week 36 while we are on week 4 would be a lot of extra weight even when home I always have a smaller 1 inch binder. When I set this binder up I typically place a month’s worth of work in the small binder so that it is easier to handle in our day-to-day life. Each month I take out the weeks we have finished and replace it with the next 5 weeks of work.
When we travel I typically leave even the smaller binder at home. I may bookmark a few pages in the books we take if I need to, but if we are on vacation I don’t have a set amount of work that we need to get done. I just view everything we do get to as one more thing accomplished. If I were to be traveling for longer than a week at a time, the smaller binder would certainly come with us.
Science While Traveling
I have talked about BookShark’s science many times, and that one of the reasons we fell in love with BookShark was the science experiments. When we travel we leave the experiments home. My son doesn’t mind making that part up when we get home. “Catching up” on experiments by doing multiple at a time is like a dream for him.
My son’s favorite books are always the science books, so it is rare for us to leave them behind. He will often sit down and read them on his own anyway, so he is always a fan of doing science. Even when on vacation.
Reading with History
Our current Level 4 history has a couple of textbooks with it. We don’t normally take these on a trip. They are a little bigger, so unless we are on a trip visiting a historic site we leave them at home.
We carry read-aloud and readers with us almost everywhere we go, even just to run errands around the house we have these. We have read on the beaches of Sydney, Australia, we have read in airports and airplanes, we have read while lounging around our hotel room, and we have read by flashlight in our tent while camping. Read-aloud and readers are smaller paper back books and are perfect to stick in my purse when we leave the house. We use them to fill our downtime so often that we are usually ahead on these. These are also our go-to for bedtime/wind down time at the end of the day.
My son would rather read or listen to me read than to do any writing. So when we are vacationing I take that into account and don’t carry as much written work, if any.
When we return from our trip we ease back into the rest of school work gently. (Just as we do after a holiday.) I set a timer and the first day we do no more than 2 hours of total work and gradually add more time. We are back in the groove in no time and we “catch up” the subjects we left behind.
Do you homeschool while traveling? I would love to hear what your family does!
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