Travel Homeschooling

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!

Before my husband and I had children, we enjoyed traveling and we envisioned a future full of travel with the family we created together.  We even talked about crazy ideas of performing music and touring as we traveled from place to place.  I guess you never know what might happen.  One of the perks of unschooling is that you can choose to teach your children in ways that they would find memorable rather than having them learn by memorization of facts that would likely be forgotten once they completed the required testing, so part of the approach we would like to use is incorporating travel into their education.  Not only will they be learning about geography, cultures, maps, modes of transportation, but they will also be learning about history, science, math, literature, foreign languages, culinary arts, psychology, anthropology, etc. along with having a lot of fun and family time.  The list goes on and on.  Travel is the perfect way to promote open mindedness and wisdom, so this is a big plan for our future.  I am going to share some of our ideas and perhaps that will help motivate others to also incorporate travel in their homeschooling if they are not already doing so.

We have not really started our travel homeschooling yet, but have done trips to Southeast and Midwest United States with the children so they are aware that there are places more than 20 miles from our home. Although, my daughter did not remember the traveling part and at times will say, "mom, can we go to Disney World today and get me a new toy?"  She must have forgotten about the 20 hour drive that occurred before we arrived at Disney World. I would consider these trips more like vacations though and not really travel homeschooling.  The travel homeschooling I have in mind for our future will include month long trips where we will start with the United States and then Canada and possibly Europe and who knows where from that point.  My son is currently obsessed with Indonesia and Africa, so you never know where we may drift once we get started.  He also said that he wants to go to Chile and look for chinchorro mummies. I will have to admit, I do not think I would be looking forward to that trip, not because of Chile, I'm sure it is beautiful, but the mummy part I could do without and I would hope we would not find any mummies while there.  That may give me nightmares.

The first trip I would like to do with the children in 2016 is Southwest United States. Our first stop would be St. Charles, Missouri where we would go to the Louis and Clark Boathouse and Nature Center.  We would probably stay there for a couple days.  My husband went to a training in St. Louis, Missouri and discovered the town of St. Charles while he was there and I thought it sounded like a great place to stay for a while during our cross country adventure.  We would need a nice stop in Northern Texas, but I have not found anything interesting up to this point.  Maybe a dude ranch or something would be interesting.  Do those still exist?  Well, anyway, my husband would like to attend a Flamenco music festival in New Mexico if we can pull it off and we would like to go to Sedona, Arizona and the Grand Canyon of course.  We would then head to the San Diego area and go to some beaches and visit some friends and relatives.  We would probably head back further north and go through Nevada and Colorado and then head home after that.  I think this would be a great educational and exciting trip.  It would be a first for my husband and my children to go out west and I have never been to Sedona that I am aware of and I have not been to St. Charles, Missouri.  So we will see where our adventures take us on this first trip.  I'll print out maps of the United States for the children and let them color the states we have been in once we start the travel homeschooling.

The second trip I have planned is Northwest United States in 2017.  We would initially head up to Wisconsin Dells and spend a couple days and then head into Minnesota.  It looks like there are some interesting waterfalls in that area that I have not seen, so that may be interesting to explore.  We would then head up to Mount Rushmore so the children can witness a piece of our history and see the great stone faces.  I remember doing this trip with my parents a few times and I always enjoyed it.  From there, we would head towards Yellowstone National Park to see the geysers and hope that the super volcano does not erupt while we are there.  That would be our luck, yikes!  We would need to visit Preston, Idaho where Napoleon Dynamite was filmed and then head to Crater Lake, Oregon.  We may stop by the redwood forests in Northern California and maybe visit San Francisco if there is enough interests in doing so.  We may visit Glazier National Park on the way home and I am sure there are some other interesting places we can explore that I am not yet aware of as we head back to the northern Midwest United States.  This trip would be a little more extensive than the 2016 trip and this is the one I am really looking forward to experiencing.  It will be such an expansive learning experience for all of us.  I have been to many of these areas, but this was when I was a child.  I am sure it would be a completely different experience at this point in my life.

The third travel homeschooling trip would be Northeast United States and Canada in 2018.  We would start with the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.  I remember going there with my parents several times and it was always awe inspiring.  I would love to share this experience with my own family.  We would then travel up through Canada.  My husband would like to go to Montreal.  It would be great to hear people speaking French and it may inspire the children to learn the language.  We would then head down through Northeastern United States through Maine and some of the smaller states along with New York.  Maybe we could even go to New York City and catch a Broadway show and visit the Statue of Liberty if we do not make it there before this time, which I could see happening.  I love New York City.  We could then make our way into Washington DC and visit educational sites in that area and then head back through Pennsylvania, visit Hershey and Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water.  My husband and I have been wanting to see this ever since we purchased our house because our home was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright.  We could end the trip with a fun day at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Oh and head home after that.  I am also really looking forward to this trip.

Other trips that we may do would include Southern Europe and then Northern Europe beginning in maybe 2020.  I just look forward to starting our traveling goals and I hope we are able to do this as planned.  Most people use the challenge of funding trips, but I figure, if it is meant to happen, so will the funds.  My husband has been playing solo guitar and may be able to set up gigs along the way and I have some ideas of doing something with music also along with possibly doing some photography and writing.  You never know, my children may have talents that can help fund the trips also at that point.  So this is our plan.  Hopefully it also encourages others to incorporate travel in their educational goals.  Unschooling is the ultimate freedom for raising children and I am so happy we discovered this as a means to educate our precious children. I am honored that we have the opportunity to provide this experience for them and I am hoping it will inspire others to do the same along the way.