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We’re a part-time road schooling family who use an eclectic curriculum: a bit of classical, a bit of leadership education, a bit of Charlotte Mason, and a bit of unschooling thrown in for good measure. Oh, and we run on a year-round schedule, which allows us to take breaks when we want. We use those breaks to travel and explore the world around us.
So what does back-to-school look like in real life for this part-time road schooling family?
Well, our school year starts and ends in June, so August and September aren’t actually our back to school time, though co-op classes and other extras do start around this time.
Throughout the summer Sunshine attends a couple camps that have been carefully chosen by us. Her favorite is Living Earth School Nature Camp. She’s attended the last 4 or 5 years and has a blast every time. She doesn’t love being outside (too many bugs!), so the fact that she enjoys camp is a win in my book.
When we’re not on a road trip and she’s not at camp, we work through coursework for classes such as typing, handwriting, math, history, creative writing, and so on. Some are online, some are textbooks, some are books we’ve purchased or borrowed from the library- we’re flexible when it comes to the form the curriculum takes.
Sunshine takes music lessons year round, though we skip them while we’re traveling or she’s at day camp. During the “school year” she takes classes at a local co-op, based on her interests. Past classes have included intro to coding, Asian cooking, real-life math, metal jewelry making, and painting and drawing. Taking a variety of classes is allowing her to see where her interests and talents lie.
Sunshine enjoys the classes, but I find they put a crimp in our travel schedule. Part of why we homeschool is so we have the flexibility to travel when we want, which is more difficult when we’re tied to the schedule of co-ops and other classes. I hate to have her miss a class, but I also hate to pay for classes she’s not attending. This won’t be a problem when we travel full time, but for now it is what it is. We see value in these classes, so for now we’re willing to deal with the inflexibility they bring to our lives.
This year she’s attending a weekly nature class offered by the Living Earth School. She attended one semester five years ago, but that was the fall that River was born, and the years since then have been a long period of adjustment and readjustment as we added the boys into the mix and figured out what did and didn’t work. We’re making it a priority this year, though, and she will attend the winter and spring semesters as well.
In the winter we’ll do some skiing. Sunshine took classes a couple years in a row before the boys were born, but the logistics involved prevented us from doing it once they were born. This year Ocean will be old enough for the preschool class, which he’ll attend with River, while Sunshine and I hit the slopes together.
So where does road schooling fit into all this?
Well, we do like our long road trips, even if we aren’t able to take them as much as we’d like. In between our long road trips, we take shorter trips to local and not-so-local historical sites, museums, national parks, etc. We try to make our destinations and/or stops along the way at least somewhat educational, which isn’t hard if you’re going to a national park site or museum, or even a jelly bean factory. Jeremy and I went to a Jelly Belly factory years ago and learned so much.
Even when we’re staying home we spend a lot of time in the car. We live outside town, and it takes at least 20-30 minutes, if not more, to get anywhere. We knew this when we bought our house, and it was a tradeoff we were willing to take to have a larger lot, more privacy, and lower prices.
All that time in the car means lots of time for podcasts and audiobooks. Our history curriculum (Story of the World) is on cd, and over the years we’ve listened to all four books multiple times while driving. I don’t mind, since I’ve learned so much that was never mentioned in any history class I took, even in college. We like the podcast Read Aloud Revival, and have listened to a number of their recommended audiobooks. A current favorite of everyone in the family, including my husband, is the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series. The narrator is fantastic!
We’re planning to travel fulltime in about two years, but I’m too much of a planner to just wing it. In the past, it’s just been me doing the planning, with input from Jeremy on stops, destinations, and routes; but this time, Sunshine gets to help too. Her big project for this year and next will combine research skills, history, geography, typing, data entry, math, and more.
She’s researching sites to visit in each state, and making a spreadsheet with links to those sites. Sites include: national and state parks, historical sites, church history sites, and other interesting sites.
Once the list is complete, we’ll map out the sites for each state and determine distances between sites and see which can be grouped together. We’ll also review and discard some of the sites, since there’s no way we can visit everything (especially since her list is currently skewing towards lots of water parks). Right now the plan is to spend an average of two weeks in each state, though some states will get more time, while some will get less.
