DIGESTIBLE FAMILY TRAVEL

Road Trip Resource Review: Carschooling

By Tonya Poole, 4-14-06

Two adults. Two kids. Two dogs. Two cats. Need I say more? Our family road trips have walked (or ridden) the line of strange and beautiful chaos that results when you put eight restless, living things in a < 100 square-foot, rolling space for many thousands of miles. Forget the grating “are we there yet” syndrome... by the time you're done with that trip it's you who can't stop asking.

But in the circle of desperate and traveling parents, brilliance abounds. Homeschooling guru Diane Flynn Keith offers up a little relief with her indispensable book and website devoted to turning travel into opportunities for learning on the road.

As homeschoolers ourselves, our school year doesn't start and stop with the calendar - knowledge, experience and understanding are lifelong pursuits for us and summer vacations are no exception. Taking Carschooling along was a fun way to pull those principles into the conversion van two summers ago, when we spent six weeks traveling across North America. But you don't have to be a homeschooling family to dig the weird facts and fun lessons in the book – in fact, you don't even have to have kids. I remember spending many a long, hot afternoon with my bare feet up on the dash while Shane drove, the book in my lap, saying “listen to this!” over and over again.

My kids soaked up some 18-wheeler chemistry, rest stop geography, license-plate math, fly-by art, a little road kill biology (ewww) and road-cut geology during that six weeks, and to this day my now 11-year-old daughter tries to identify the bugs entombed on the windshield by the color and consistency of the splat... a budding entomologist?

You can find the book at Flynn's website, or through Amazon.com.

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