Roadschooling & Homeschool – How to Make it Work!
What is roadschooling?
Roadschooling is a term that is becoming more and more common these days. It simply means taking your homeschool on the road! Think homeschool + travel (usually on the road) = roadschool!
Travel can be by many ways of transportation & accommodations can also vary. But the most popular way to roadschool in recent years is by RV. Traveling in your living space. Makes the perfect setting to school on the road!
If you aren’t already a homeschooling family, roadschool may be a sort of vacation from “real life” you’ve been dreaming about.
It can give you a chance to have quality family time and experiences you would never have with your current day to day schedule.
Or maybe you already homeschool and want to add in a hands on experience by bringing your children’s education to life.
Visit historic locations, national parks, see all the beautiful nooks and crannies of our great country.
Whatever the dream, below you’ll find all you need to know to get started with roadschooling!
Homeschool = Flexibility for Roadschooling
Homeschool has so MANY perks! I am almost 10 years in and I’m still discovering new benefits all the time.
Flexibility is probably one of the biggest perks of all. Being completely on your own schedule/clock/timeline, whatever you want to call it, is priceless when it comes to embracing your kids’ childhood.
Flexibility in all of the “everydays” but also being flexible to travel when YOU want to and not when the school calendar gives you permission. This lends itself perfectly to roadschool.
Traveling when it works for your schedule, or for a specific season or time of year that you want to visit a certain spot is so freeing. Being able to be in charge of your time is such an amazing feeling and homeschool offers in so many ways, especially when it comes to roadschool.
Another big reason there has been such a rise in roadschooling, is the increasingly popular option to work remotely for a lot of parents. This has families that are able to explore the wondrous world of roadschool life (thanks to homeschool and remote work) hitting the road!
How to start roadschooling
Just like with getting started homeschooling, make sure you cover all things legal first! I wrote a whole post on this (linked above!) and it all applies to roadschool.
From filing your letter of intent, making sure to fully understand your state’s homeschool laws (so thankful for HSLDA for all the legal info & explanation of requirements), and being up to date on any necessary testing or homeschool evaluations before you get traveling is so very important. It’s also a whole lot easier to get all of those details out of the way before you leave your home area.
Once the legal “stuff” is covered it’s now time to plan what you will do for learning & school work once you’re on the road.
Learning Ideas for Roadschooling
Depending on whether you already homeschool, or again are just embarking on this adventure, it’s a good idea to have some sort of plan in place.
You may be wanting to fully embrace the idea of unschooling and an interest led style of learning.
Learn from your destinations. Learn from life – budgeting and grocery planning & shopping, figuring out mileage between stops, gas mileage, weather tracking, etc. are some ways to be learning math.
Reading & history are perfect subjects to learn about with travel, especially to historic places and National Parks.
In fact, the National Parks Service have an awesome learning opportunity at just about every location, the Junior Ranger program. Kids ages 6-13 (although all ages can participate) check in at the park office and receive an activity booklet to complete while visiting the park.
Once completed, bring the completed booklets back to the park office and depending on the locations, a park ranger may ask your kiddos a few questions and they then receive a Junior Ranger badge and certificate. It’s a really cool opportunity for some educational fun!
Planning your homeschool while roadschooling
If you plan to keep up with your current homeschool schedule as much as possible, keep in mind you will most likely have to adjust some things.
For instance, if you have a lot of books and workbooks, think about how you can make that work in a smaller space, like an RV. Consider planning out exactly how long you would ideally like to be roadschooling, and make a plan similar to how you would plan your normal school year.
Decide what needs to be done in the time frame of your trip. Maybe tear out workbook pages for each subject and put into one binder with dividers. Each child would then have just one binder for their work. Making storage a lot easier to manage.
Unit studies are a fantastic idea for keeping up with schoolwork while roadschooling. I wrote a whole post on unit studies, what they are and how to plan your own which would be a great place to start if you’re considering using them.
Online schooling is another great idea for roadschooling families. As long as you have Wi-Fi along the way, your child could login and complete work needed on your own schedule.
This is another great way to reduce the need for a lot of books & school supplies on the road. There are numerous accredited online schools available to homeschooling families, making this an idea that’s worth looking into if you’re into this type of learning.
How to make roadschooling work for you
Having a schedule or routine in mind before setting out is super important for most days. Not everyday will be the same while roadschooling, as is the same in other parts of life, but routines can definitely help.
Kids tend to thrive when they knew what’s expected of them, and even with the fluidity of being on the road, this holds true. Knowing that certain times of the day are set aside for certain tasks, helps keep things moving smoothly for all.
Roadschool fun
US Geography
Assuming you’re traveling in the continental United States, this is the perfect opportunity for a really in-depth US geography lesson! Pre-planning what states you’re traveling to, or even just going with the flow and seeing where the wind takes you, make geography part of your plan!
There are a lot of great geography resources out there. We have used this US States and Capitals set a couple of times in our homeschool, and it would be a fabulous companion to roadschooling.
The set includes a really fun book, Don’t Know Much About the 50 States, which has facts for each state and some really great tidbits of lesser known info for each state. I loved learning alongside my kids with this set!
We took a cross country road trip a few years ago and this National Geographic road atlas, along with the Don’t Know Much About the 50 States, provided so much fun for all of us learning about each state we traveled through. Our copy of the atlas has been updated to this version, which looks just as good!
Another great learning opportunity roadschool can provide is the art of reading a map – a paper map! With GPS these days maps are pushed aside but knowing how to read a map is a life skill everyone needs to know.
We also have a large US Atlas that has been an amazing resource for our kids. Both with road trips for when they’re curious about a state.
Worldschooling
If you’re outside the continental US or maybe worldschooling (you guessed it, homeschool while traveling the world!), there are plenty of opportunities to learn more about the geography where you’re visiting too.
This book has been such a wonderful addition to not only our homeschool but also just our household in general. We all find ourselves flipping through and soaking up all of the beautiful illustrations as well as the interesting facts. It’s always out in our house!
Geocaching
Geocaching is another great possibility for your roadschool adventures. If you’re not familiar with geocaching, it’s basically a treasure hunt using an app, found through www.geocaching.com , where locations are found using GPS coordinates.
A good friend of mine introduced us to geocaching years ago and it’s really such a great learning experience and a lot of fun too!
It’s a perfect family activity, with parents obviously managing the app & locations to visit. Some caches aka treasures are smaller log books of sorts and other larger caches will have trinkets and small treasures.
Similar to how a little free library works, the idea of leaving something when you take something, applies here.
Scrapbooks
Digital or paper style, having your children document your family adventures makes a wonderful keepsake!
Photos, a journal entry a day, pressed flowers or leaves, brochures or photos of places visited, a map with states colored in that you visited or pin points for each location visited… the ideas are endless for this scrapbook.
Think how fun this would be to look back on in years to come 🙂
Our kids journaled for our cross country road trip and it’s such a sweet way to relive all of the great memories.
This could also serve as part of your homeschool portfolio evaluation, if one is required by your home state.
Roadschooling – enjoy the ride!
If you’re embarking on this big adventure, or maybe just dreaming about the day you would like to, I hope this was inspiring to you.
Roadschooling may be a lot of work to plan, and some days may feel very long in a small space ALLLL together haha, but it will be so worth it for the amazing memories made.
