Homeschooling On the Road – How It Works
A reader wrote in today asking how we manage homeschooling on the road. Well, it’s a lot easier than you may think!
Richard is incredibly gifted with technical stuff and, when we’re on the road, the children, who do their lessons on laptop computers, have Internet access through our T-mobile card (cell phone access), or Richard has them networked with his machine while it’s on wireless access at the campgrounds.
The school they attend online, OakMeadow.com, (a fully-accredited private school that permits distance learning for its students) is extremely flexible. We get online on Monday and the children download their assignments for the week. If they won’t be online that week for some reason, we save the reading portion of their assignments to their computers so they can still read the instructions and lessons (lectures, if you will) while offline.
If we something planned for one day and they absolutely can’t do that day’s lesson, they can do it the next day. If there is a topic being taught that they children already know about, we can supplement it with another topic. That happened to Ali this year – she had just spent a month studying Nelson Mandela
and, when we enrolled her at Oak Meadow, one of the first lessons was about…Nelson Mandela. Ali opted to instead spend the week studying the history of biological weapons. (Yes, that topic was her idea.)
What works best for us is when the children do one subject per day (an entire week of Math on Monday, History on Tuesday, Science on Wednesday and English on Thursday) and then do their tests on Friday. While they may finish math in only three hours (yes, that’s an entire week of math – amazing how much time is wasted in public school!), their science projects for the week may take six or even eight hours. It changes each week. They’re actually spending much fewer hours doing their schooling than they did in public school.
We are permitted to supplement their education in anyway we feel is appropriate. But, we don’t tell them we’re doing so. For example, I can buy a fun book on native Maine fruits and vegetables and then take Ali and Frank to the nursery to buy some of those plants. They then spend the afternoon reading about the plants (so they’ll know where to plant them – sun or shade -, how often to water them, how long germination takes, harvest, etc.) and then they’ll plant their plants. Several days later, when the seedling erupt from the soil, they are excited and several weeks later they read and learn how to harvest the fruits and vegetables and the entire family benefits from their harvest at mealtimes.
During that time, they’ve learned what happens when plants get too much water, they’ve looked up insects they’ve found eating their plants in our bug book, and they’ve learned why some plants survive and others don’t.
While many families plant gardens, we’ve encouraged the children to research the science of gardening and, without them even knowing, we’ve supplemented their education with facts about plants, weather, insects, and more! They think they were just playing…but we know better. 
If we’re in Pennsylvania, we can rent the movie Gettysburg and look up specific facts alongside the children about that battle and even visit the museum there and take the battleground tour. The children thought it was just a fun sidetrip…but we know better! They’ve learned about the civil war, about the injustices of slavery, compassion for suppressed people, historical facts and individuals, and more.
This fall, we’re planning a trip to Florida and to Sea World. In anticipation of that trip, we watched a documentary on Sea World (we Tivo’d it and the kids have watched it dozens of times) that details the care and habitat of sea lions, penguins, sharks, killer whales and manitees. We’ll be reading books about these sea creatures before our trip so we’ll have more to talk about. The children think we’re just watching neat shows and reading cool, colorful books about fish and mammals that live in the water. We know better… They’re learning how to do their part to protect those helpless creatures by not littering and by not doing other things to harm the environment (turning off lights so the local power plant doesn’t need to use so much power and put out too much pollution, etc.). They’ve also learned that it’s NOT okay to harvest little critters from the river and put them in aquariums (where they’ll probably die) because
doing so not only harms those critters, but also the environment.
I could go on and on with this, but you see my point. Since the children aren’t spending so much time in school standing in line, waiting for the teacher to get off the phone, waiting for the teacher to help or even discipline other children, etc., etc., they’re learning far more at a much faster rate. This enables us to supplement their education with all these other fun activities and trips.
And, yes, we still have plenty of time to run our business.
If your child is enrolled in a private distance-learning school, such as Oak Meadow, you may not have to deal with the headaches of reporting your child’s homeschooling status to your local authorities. But, there are many affordable curriculums available if you’d like to be your child’s sole teacher. You can read more about homeschooling and the different state requirements here: http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/