Are you feeling the urge to embrace adventure and hit the road? Perhaps roadschooling is for you. Roadschooling is becoming increasingly popular especially in an age where parents can work from home with the miracle that is the internet.
What is Roadschooling?
Roadschooling is homeschool or online schooling that is done while travelling. This could be a year long adventure that takes your family around the country in an RV. It could also be a week long road trip visiting a few great historical places or national parks. In essence roadschooling is any schooling that takes place while you are travelling.
Some families roadschool full time. They are often called “full time families”. These are the people who don’t have a permanent fixed address. Full time families usually live in an RV and travel around the country all year long. They may have a home base that they return to every few months or so to recharge and connect with family and friends but generally their life is in their RV.
Other families choose to roadschool for shorter periods of time. They may opt to take school on the road over Summer and visit some of the places they have learned about through out the year. They don’t even have to be regular homeschoolers. Many mainstreamed schooled families opt for this type of schooling at different times or during school breaks.
What are the Benefits of Roadschooling?
The world is so much bigger than what exists inside the classroom! Taking your children out into the world to see the places they have learned about is such a great way for them to connect with what they are learning.
- Make History Come Alive: Roadschooling can help make history more real for children. Once they see where battles were fought and history was made it becomes more than just words in a text book. They can feel and absorb history as it really was. When you are able to see and engage with history is becomes a part of you. Children are going to remember more and understand events at a much deeper level than if they were to just read about it.
- Experience Nature: We all know nature is food for the soul. It invigorates and clears our minds. Roadschooling takes you to many beautiful and wonderful natural wonders. You can hike through rainforests, mountain bike through the canyons and swim in the ocean.
Roadschooling allows you to connect with nature beyond anything you would be able to do in a regular school week. - Gain a respect for the environment, plant life, and animal life: When children get to see wondrous places and watch the wild life they are going to be more motivated to care for it. If they simply hear about these places needing protection they are much less likely to care. If they have walked the trails and seen the animals it becomes real to them. And real things matter.
The National Park System is fantastic for educating children and adults on what they can do to help and the struggles that they are facing. - Exposure to different ways of life: The world is bigger than your back yard. There are so many interesting and diverse people throughout the world. They have so much to offer your children and vice versa. Engaging with those of different cultures and ways of living increases our understanding and respect for others.
- Children become more well rounded: When you see more, you know more. Seeing the world outside of your own bubble helps children to realise how big the world really is. They realise that there is so much to life and how much they can do in the world. Their focus on themselves, and selfishness decreases as they instead focus on changes they can make in the world and the impact they can have.
- Exposure to new passions. Roadschooling opens up many different opportunities to try out new hobbies and develop a love for something they may never have had the chance to experience otherwise. This could be rock climbing in the canyons of Southern Utah, or wildlife watching in wilderness of Alaska the sky is the limit.
- Increased unity within the family: When you spend everyday together you are bound to make some amazing memories. Memories are what binds us together as families. When you get together with your siblings as adults there is always bit of reminiscing happening. Taking on challenges together, monumental hikes, theme parks, and seeing incredible places are going to cement some of the best memories in your child’s mind but it will be all the little parts that bring your children closer to you and their siblings. Late night conversations around the campfire and long car rides bring with them some of the best memories.
How to Homeschool on the Road
Homeschooling on the road adds a few more complexities compared to homeschooling at home. Space is going to be the biggest challenge. It is going to be difficult to bring an entire library of books, due both to space and weight. There are a few options though.
- Go online. There are many online schools that you can enrol your children in. The majority of the work is completed online, which save space and also saves you from having to manage and come up with the curriculum for your children. If you choose a school close to your home based they are usually able to attend in person when you are in town as well as participate in school events such as sports days and dances.
- If you don’t want to go with an online school there are also a lot of different curriculums that are offered online, especially math.
- Consolidate your library into ebook or audiobook format and purchase a tablet or kindle of some sort. We are Apple fan’s around here but my kids hate to read off them. I understand it because it does start to hurt your eyes and it gets heavy after awhile. For this reason alone I am going to invest in some kindles. They are much more gentle on the eyes and the battery life is extraordinary! They can remain charged for weeks at a time. Perfect for long car trips. Someone is always complaining about the iPad going flat whenever we go anywhere these days so we just don’t bring them.
- Go the unschool route. There is a method of homeschooling that encourages to learn from life and from experiences. If that peaks your interest you need to check out this post. Roadschooling and unschooling are the perfect combination.
- Create some kind of routine so that you manage to fit everything in. You could say “on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we are going to get all out school and work done then so site seeing on the other days” Or maybe doing school and work every morning or afternoon will work best for your family.
How to Afford Roadschooling
Unfortunately travelling costs money. It’s just one of those facts of life. However where there is a will there is usually a way. There are many different ways in which you could fund a roadschooling adventure for your family.
- Sell the house: Lot’s of families sell up everything and hit the road. The RV lifestyle can be done for as cheap or as expensive as you like. There are RV’s from $2k-10million!
Selling the house can give you a good amount of cash to get started. - Pick up odd jobs along the way. Families can make money on the road by picking up odd casual jobs that may last a few days to a few weeks.
- Work while you are at home. Many full time families return to their home base for a few weeks every few months and work to save up enough money to head back out. This could be working as a nurse or teaching as a substitute etc.
- Ask your employer if you can work remotely. If you are able to put forward a good proposal you will be surprised and how often employers are okay with this. When it comes down to it, they just want the job done and done well. If you can figure out how to do that from an RV then why not.
- Start an online business. Online businesses are fantastic because you can work where ever you want so long as there is an internet connection. There are a million ideas for online businesses, blogging, youtube, internet marketing, MLM companies are a few that a lot of roadschoolers engage in.
- Look for jobs that can be done remotely. Things like graphic design, freelance writing, editing, online teaching. Teaching english to children in China is a very popular.
Roadschooling Laws
You will always want to be sure to be following the law when homeschooling and this is definitely still important while on the road. Homeschooling is legal in every state but the laws regarding homeschooling vary from state to state. You need to abide by the laws of your domicile state. That is that state where you have a registered address.
You may say “but we don’t have an address?”. If you no longer have an address or an address of a family member you can use then there are various companies that will provide you with an address. These companies are specifically for full time RV’ers.
If this is the path you are planning to go then you will probably want to pick a state with the least restrictive homeschooling laws.
There is a fantastic post here that gives you a lot more detail regarding this area of discussion. There are lots of options to weigh up what is the best path for your family.
How Will the Children Make Friends
Lots of parents want to do this but they worry about how their children will make friends. This is a very really concern and fear that can hold families back from taking this chance. There are lots of ways for your children to find friends. Unfortunately they probably won’t be seeing these friends everyday like they would in a school environment but that doesn’t mean they can’t make meaningful connections and friendships.
When you are roadschooling you learn to make friends quickly and skip past all the early friendship awkwardness and get right into the real stuff because time is often short.
The invention of Facetime and social media means that kids can still connect with their friends from all over the the country and back at home.
- Kids staying at the same park as your family. RV parks and National Parks are the perfect place to find other families. There are other kids looking for friends to play with too. It’s good for mom and dad to make some friends too.
- Full time families rallies: There are rallies organised multiple times a year all over the country for families of full time RV’ers. This is where you are going to connect with 100’s of other RV’ing families with kids like yours. These rallies usually include classes, activities and even babysitting! If you have young children you will know how hard it is to go on a date while travelling.
- Caravanning. Caravanning is where a two or more families travel together. This could last for a few days or a few weeks. Caravanning is great for kids to really get the chance to form solid relationships.
- Siblings. You are probably going to be dragging a sibling or more along on this adventure. Siblings actually make wonderful friends. I think that so often we get caught up if wanting our children to have friends that we forget that they have some sleeping right next to them.
Roadschooling will without a doubt give your family an adventure unlike anything else. There is so much to see and do in this world. If this is something that you want to do you can most certainly pull it off. Whether you go for a a few weeks over Summer or take the big full time leap!
