How To Make Travel and Vacations Meaningful Education Experiences for Kids

One of the many reasons we homeschool is the freedom to travel.  Our life experience is that visiting the world brings you closer to it, building a deeper bond with peoples of the world. It also puts muscle and color onto the dry bones of book based history, geography, and anthropology.  There isn't anything like talking about WWII with our girls, and then recalling our visit to Dresden.  History gets teeth this way. This, a huge part of our home education model is to include travel.

From our home school charter Philosophy section

III.4: "Actual experience is a far superior teacher to theoretical constructs.  As such, Exerevno Academy aggressively seeks to provide its students with experience based learning opportunities."

and from the tactics section of our home school charter

VII.3: "Cultivate self-driven inclusion in the human race with extensive travel"

Our girls have thus far been to 22 different countries, traveled by train, plane, boat, bus, automobile, motorcycle, bike, and their own two feet.  They've backpacked in Europe, Kayaked in Honduras, rode camels in the Sahara, and more.  We literally started when they were babies, carrying them with us as we explored the world.  All this experience has allowed us to hone our travel infused education model.

What follows are some of the ways we blend our girls education with our passion for experiencing the world.

Folders For Trips

For any trip we take, we start educating ourselves on the place about 6 months out.  In the case of Egypt, however, we started about a year out. Each week we do something related to the trip.  This something is always two or more hours in duration, and can span multiple weeks.

In the very first week, we discuss our upcoming trip in detail.  We talk about what we want to get out of the trip, why we are taking the trip, and the kinds of things we would each like to do.  We build out a tenative itinerary and plan together.  We then create holding folders for the trip.  The front cover is a map of the area to be visited.  These folders not only keep things organized, but are put away for the girls when we are done so that when they are adults, they have a nice keep sake.

Youngest With Her Map

Our first set of activities are always map related, and takes about a month to complete. The girls build out world maps, showing where they are and where the destination is.  If we are going through multiple countries, they mark each country on the map. With the world map done, we then drill in and they build out country maps (one per each country visited).  On each country map, they identify major cities and land features (such as rivers).  In some cases, like when we went to Paris, we had them do city maps too, showing where major things like the Eiffel
Tower and the Louvre were in relation to our hotel.

Our second set of activities is always history related, and takes about about a month to complete.  The girls start building out history time-lines, showing major events in a particular countries history.  We usually build these out using history podcasts from university history lecturers.

Our third set of activities is around the famous people associated with the countries to be visited.  Be they good, bad, or otherwise, we study the major historical people that are associated with a place.   It is neat because the girls have bumped into some of the same characters now multiple times like Napoleon and Julius Caesar. This approach has also let us view these people from multiple perspectives.  Napoleon's quest in Egypt, for example, with his 150 scholars, engineers, and scientists as a major part of his force highlights a different view than we got when we studied him before going to France.

Once we have our maps, history, and people noted, we then go in multiple directions.  We make dishes from the country, we listen to music from the country, we study art from the country and create our versions of it, we do projects related to the religion of the country, we study the political system of the country, we write fiction stories about the people in the country, and so on.  We create fiction stories

Stories, Colorings, and Paper dolls

about people in a country, and we write out own history books on a place.

The results, after years of doing this, have been astonishing. The girls have demonstrated tremendous knowledge about places, people, and history as compared to others their age (and older)  as they whip out facts, opinions, and thoughts based on first hand experience and study.

We have done a few TV shows as sources for material, but have found that the information does not stick as well as when they do their own projects or when the listen to the same information in a podcast.  This probably isn't surprising, but anecdotal evidence that TV isn't the ideal way to gain knowledge (at least not for our kids).

Abu Sunbil July 2016

It is a lot of work for me, to get all this material rolling.  However, the experience can't be beat.  It also helps increase the value of a particular vacation.  For example, traveling to Egypt ended up costing us around $12,000.  We were gone for 2 weeks, coming out to an average of about $860 per day, or about $210 per head per day.  However, looked at another way, we spent a year studying the place before we left.  We built dioramas, listened to songs, ate different foods, etc. that we wouldn't have and that is also time that could count towards the 2 weeks.  If I were to estimate, I'd say we spent 4 weeks of time doing these other things before we got to Egypt.  That makes the entire Egypt trip event 6 weeks (2 there plus the 4 actively preparing).  Now we have a spend of about $285 per day, or about $70 per head per day.  Well worth it!!!