Summer often means family vacations. If your vacation involves a road trip, you may be wondering how you are going to survive the hours in the car. Granted, today's technology offers DVD players, iPods, and assorted other means of entertainment for the children in the back seat, but there's another approach that might engage their minds more effectively.
When my boys were in elementary school, we incorporated geography and travel logs with our road trips, and found that it helped them be more involved in the trip and learn road navigation. Now I realize that we have access to GPS technology today, so what I'm suggesting falls in the category of "old school"; but doesn't homeschooling in general fall in that same category? After all, we won't always have the benefit of GPS at our fingertips, and map-reading skills are beneficial in a variety of ways.
So what did this involve? A folder for each of the children who will participate, maps of the areas in which you will travel, and notebook paper. At that time, I photocopied the appropriate pages of our road atlas and included that in the boys' folders. As we started on our trip, we them locate the main towns through which we would travel. Then we asked them to identify and mark the route that we would be following and the rest areas along the route. On occasion during the trip, we would ask them to figure out where we were along the route, showing them how to identify the mile markers and exits so that they could find our location. If someone in the family needed a "pit stop" we asked them to locate the nearest opportunity and direct us.
When we stopped to see sites of interest along the way, we encouraged the boys to collect brochures from those sites, as well as admission tickets or other memorabilia and stash them in the pockets of their folders. Each day the boys would write a journal entry concerning the day - noting the highlight(s) of the day, or new things they learned, or what they were looking forward to in the remainder of the trip.
At the end of the trip, while I was catching up on laundry and putting things away, the boys worked on completing their journals. They completed the marking of our routes on their maps, put the brochures on pages with captions, and finished their journal entries. The result provided an individualized journal/photo album for them to enjoy, along with navigation skills that kept them "in tune" with our progress ... and helped us to hear less of "are we there yet?"
Oh, and we never went on a road trip without a Sonlight book (or two) to read along the way. By reading one chapter per hour, we broke up the activity in the car to allow individual and group activities ... at least until we got to the point of "oh, Mom, don't stop reading yet" and passed the book around for others to take turns reading chapters aloud.
Try it, you might find road trips more enjoyable!
Kelly
Friday, July 8, 2011
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