It’s the dream of many homeschooling families to be able to live in an RV and travel! What a fantastic education travel provides! Whether your dream is to travel full time, most of us call it roadschooling, or to go on regular educational family vacations, educational travel is a wonderful option for homeschooling families.
Giving Our Children Experiences
The truth is that most of our children have way too much stuff! But what they really need is time, relationships, and experiences! They need to go places and have experiences to learn about life, possible future careers, taking responsibility for themselves, and so many other things! Whether you’re able to buy an RV and go roadschooling full time or whether you rent an RV and go on vacation or take educational family trips, spending time traveling with your children is so much more beneficial to the whole family than buying things!
What Exactly Is Roadschooling?
For a great introduction to roadschooling, you can read this article on the Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers site. And here’s another article about a family with older children. This family calls it worldschooling instead of roadschooling since they include travel to other countries.
What If Roadschooling Isn’t Right for Your Family?
As I mentioned above, some families want educational travel experiences without living on the road. They want to give their children educational experiences (and honestly, most parents enjoy educational experiences too–especially when experiencing them with their children! We don’t have to stop learning just because we’re adults!) and have fun together as a family. I know that my family and I not only have a wonderful time traveling and learning together, but we just plain enjoy having time together when we’re away from the day-in-and-day-out responsibilities of home.
How Can You Work Educational Family Travel into Your Schedule?
If you’re looking for some wonderful and easy (We do all the planning!) educational travel experiences for your family, we would love to tell you about our HEART trips! (Homeschool ♥ Enrichment ♥ Adventure ♥ Road ♥ Trip) You can read about the two trips we have planned for this year on the travel section of our site.
In October, we are headed to New Mexico to study geology and the dessert Southwest through the lens of the inhabitants. We start with a nice slow float down the Rio Grande with a Pueblo guide explaining to us what nature means to his people. Once we are back on land, we will have a Native American feast prepared by our guide’s family waiting on us. As we enjoy our meal around a campfire, we will talk about the full Hunter Moon that is rising…. and this sets the tone for our Fall Homeschool Road Trip! Community is a big part of our trips, we focus on bringing families together where it is comfortable and fun to build relationships with other homeschooling families. (NOTE: This trip is coming up soon, so if you’re interested, go ahead and read the article and get signed up! We always have a few families contact us after it’s too late to join the trip! We don’t want that to happen to your family!) Many of the families joining us this time will be traveling and staying in their own RVs – making our trip a part of their roadschooling experience! But for those of us who don’t have RVs we have blocks of hotel rooms waiting for you to reserve them!
Why Travel with Other Homeschooling Families?
As much as we love traveling with our own families, there’s still an extra element of fun and excitement when we travel with other homeschooling families. We’re entering our fourth year of hosting educational travel for homeschooling families, and we’ve seen over and over how traveling with other homeschooling families adds to the fun and adventure, encourages our children and our parents to form life-long relationships with other homeschoolers, and enhances the educational experiences we have to make them more fun and more beneficial to all of us! If you can’t always travel with other homeschooling families, you should still do it now and then if you possibly can!
What We’re Doing to Encourage Families to Travel
Not only do we plan HEART trips to encourage homeschooling families to participate in part-time educational travel, but we’ve also realized that companies need to be aware that a growing number of homeschooling families are interested in educational travel. We want those companies to know we’re here and to know what we want and need in order to make educational travel (especially educational RV travel for those who want to roadschool full timej or part time) a possibility.
Why We’re Attending RVX
Trish and I are going to have the opportunity to attend an event in March called RVX (which stands for The RV Experience) in Salt Lake City. At RVX, RV manufacturers and suppliers will unveil the latest RV products to their dealer partners. They’ll share information about consumer trends, growing consumer segments (like homeschooling families!), and new products and features. This event is the kick-off to camping season, and we’re thrilled to be invited to attend and to represent homeschooling families like yours!
One of the reasons for attending this event is so that we can see what’s new and what might be of particular interest to homeschooling families. And of course we’ll be sharing (on social media and here on the site) some of the things we’re doing and seeing so you can find out more about what’s available to you. And while we’re there, we want to let folks know that homeschoolers are an awesome group of folks with smart, interesting children who love to learn and explore.
We’re excited to have this opportunity to be an ambassador for homeschooling families and to meet the other media there! Some very well known publications will be at the event, and we’re hoping to get to chat with some of them about homeschooling and homeschooling families!
- Esquire – City Escape
- O, The Oprah Magazine – Destination Camping
- Woman’s Day – Family Friendly
- Travel & Leisure –Luxury Living
- Wired – On the Horizon
- Backpacker and Outside – Outdoor Adventure
- Whalebone – Van Life
- Popular Mechanics – Sustainability
- Sports Illustrated – Team Tailgate
Some of the media partners in attendance will, after RVX, go on their own RV trips and share about them with folks who are interested in RVs as a means of vacationing or possibly as a way of life! Trish and I were happy to have been able to experience such an RV trip several months ago at Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park in North Java, New York. You can read about it here.Â
We truly are excited about attending RVX–where we’ll be able to tour display vehicles, talk about homeschooling families, and represent you!
A Look Into the Future of Camping
Something else we’re really looking forward to experiencing and sharing is a look into the future of camping! KOA (Kampgrounds of America) will be there to give us a look at what camping might be like in the year 2030. KOA will have a virtual reality display showcasing different design elements based on landscapes in urban, seaside, forested, moutainous, and desert campground settings. For example, in the future campers will be able to do things like use on-site automated voice command technology to order services or deliveries (of firewood, for example) and sign up for experiences. There will be retractable roofs on cabins and glass-floored campsites so campers can see the natural landscapes, such as rivers or valleys, that the campsite is perched upon. (This will be particularly exciting to thrill-seekers like me!!) There will even be pet parks with bathing areas and enhanced water features for pets!
According to KOA president Toby O’Rourke, since 2014, more than six million North American households have adopted the camping lifestyle–with campers who camp three or more times a year having increased by 64 percent.
Be sure to follow along with our adventures. The hashtag is #RVX2019. Leave us a comment below to let us know if there is anything in particular you want us to cover while we are there!
Traveling was never part of our plans when we started homeschooling. We have thoroughly enjoyed traveling with Homeschool Road Trips. We’ve learned about lots of things we hadn’t even considered studying.
We LOVE having you and your sweet family on our trips!! To be honest, it wasn’t something we had plans to do either, but we’re so thankful it’s worked out this way because we love it! And we love meeting so many wonderful homeschooling families too!
I always gave my daughter experiences over things. Learning about nature, recycling, animals, bugs, etc is the most beautiful gift you can give a child. So many kids these days worry about the materialistic things and that saddens me. The most important gifts in life are free, and knowledge is just one of them.
What a wonderful idea. We love to travel but making it a learning experience would be unforgettable!
I recently read an article about road schooling. I think it’s a great way to actually show kids the world.
I am blessed to have a son and daughter-in-law who have 3 children being home schooled. They are well adjusted, off time is small educational trips in the Southern IN vicinity as well as I’ll. and KY. My grandchildren are thriving because of being homeschooled.
How wonderful to travel and experience with other homeschooling families. This article was very interesting to read since I do not homeschool. Thank you.
This is a great idea. Doing something is better than just reading about it.
This is really true. I know that I remember the things that Mom did with me more fondly than the things she bought me. I remember everything we did together because she worked alot
This is a great idea and way for kids to learn hands on. I will pass this on to my sister who is homeschooling her children.
My daughter and I love taking road trips! It could be as close as the next town over to walk the Thousand Steps trail and teach her the history of coal mining industry. I take her on longer trips to the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, and the abandoned amusement park. Interesting things keep her attention and is easier for her to learn.
My sister does homeschooling for her kids. This sounds like a great hands on experience.
I love this concept.
One of my biggest goals (nay, my BIGGEST goal!) as a homeschooling, work-from-home mom is to be able to have the freedom (financial and otherwise) for our family to travel extensively! We need a home-base because we have kids with medical needs that need regular routine and specialty care, but to have the ability to pick up and go on a whim wherever our hearts desire is my ultimate dream!
Hope to eventually join you guys on one of your awesome road trips one day!!!
I completely agree with the title to this post. My sons are grown & trust me they truly remember the experiences over the stuff. Spend time with them & teach them everything! you wish you had known. As a single, working mom I couldn’t homeschool them but that didn’t stop me from being their teacher.
My sons are grown. The stuff comes & goes. But memories are forever!
I hope we can spend one year traveling the country before our kids are grown.
I wish my family could travel. Unfortunately we ate lucky to make our finances work here at home. I can’t imagine how we would find the money or time to travel. I will look forward to reading about your travels.
If you can’t make in-real-life travel work for your family right now, go on virtual field trips! Just type in “virtual field trip to ___” and fill in the blank with where you want to go. 🙂 (Of course you’ll want to take a look at the websites first to be sure nothing unexpected or inappropriate comes up.) We’ve found all kinds of wonderful virtual field trips online!
I would love to roadschool! Maybe one day! We definitely want to start saving up to join you all on some of these trips!
My husband was in the Air Force Reserve. We were sent to many weekend getways for pre & post deployment seminars. Officially it was ahomeschooling trip, but we sure learned alot. I was so grateful to expose my kids to different places. I think traveling with another homeschooling family would be such a wonderful thing to try!
We want to start traveling more!
We hope to be able to incorporate more travel learning into our homeschooling in the near future!!!