My daughters are scattered around the house today reading books in various nooks. I started wondering if homeschoolers vacation differently than families with children in public schools?
When the topic of homeschooling comes up often we tout the academic advantages of homeschooling. For example we’ll mention that children can spend more time studying topics that interest them and being able to move at their own pace. One of the problems government schools really struggle with is how to cover the material in such a way as to engage the whole class. Too often some children mastered the material in the first couple minutes and are bored for the rest of the hour while others spend the full hour and still don’t understand the new material. Both groups end up frustrated and often cause trouble. In contrast homeschoolers can cover the material as fast as needed.
In pondering homeschoolers and vacation the first thing that jumped out at me is the flexibility. Over the years Janine and I have greatly enjoyed playing tourist in off seasons which prices are cheaper and lines are shorter. Disneyland is a lot more fun in March and April as compared to August when the lines are long and the weather hot.
Another thing I’ve noticed is frequently we try to tie some educational aspect of the vacation into the trip. Over the last the last ten years we have gone back East about five times. Every time we’ve hit historical sites. I’m sure some families with children in public schools try to leverage vacations to further an education purpose, but because education dominates the minds of homeschoolers I would be surprised if the average family with children in public schools comes anywhere close to what average homeschooling families do on vacation.
Do you think homeschoolers experience vacation in any other different ways?
5 comments:
I know we love the off-season prices and crowds (or lack thereof)! We also try to do something educational.
I loved being able to go places in the off season and not have to wait on crowds! Plus the added advantage of it usually cost less. We loved to camp out on our vacations and explore different parts of the country, so we headed south where it was warmer and got out of our freezing area!
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Hi Henry,
Our last vacation was planned around an educational experience that my 14 yr old begged to continue. We flew from TX to the Northeast so he could attend MIT's Splash weekend again. His younger brother got to attend for the first time. So the vacation's main goal was formal learning classes for 2 days.
The other 4 days of the trip were travel time, visiting friends and visiting family. Since were just back where we used to live we did nothing "educational" or "historic sightseeing". Every other time we've been in Boston we have done a museum day and also we did a week doing the Freedom Trail with Boy Scouts, so we felt like in year's past we "did a ton of educational stuff around Boston".
Last time we did a Florida trip we did Disney plus a whole day at the Kennedy Space Center and other days with relatives.
We don't always do learning stuff on vacations.
Our next trip will have educational stuff in it, kids & I tagging along on a long car ride trip where DH has a business trip so we have a free hotel room to use.
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