When I first started homeschooling, I was convinced that every part of school time needed to occur at home. I knew there would be field trips and other educational adventures but surely our daily math, reading, writing, etc would always happen in our house or yard. About a month into that first year, I realized how wrong I was.
There simply we’re not enough hours in the day. You see, I have a super flexible ministry job but sometimes I do need to be in the office. This left huge chunks of at least two days a week where we’d have to save school until the afternoon or even some pieces to the evening. Then it hit me. Why shouldn’t my boys get some of their independent work completed while I was working? We could all be doing something productive and give us more time together later. To say this freed up time in our week is an understatement.
By mid-October, I realized we were spending a decent amount of time in the car running errands. At the time, our oldest was attending a public school just outside of our local school district – meaning I had to drive him to and from school every day. Why should the second one have to waste time sitting while we drove to and from the school? Instead of him just hanging out in his car seat, we looked through his daily tasks and found four that he could easily complete in the car. From then on, he’d grab one of those any time we got in the car to drop off his brother or run for a grocery pick up. Yes, we were those people who had already decided grocery pick up was a necessary part of our lives pre-COVID.
By the end of the month of October, we had our first full day of what we jokingly call car schooling. Though we still did our morning gathering time at home, the rest of our work went mobile. It was my sister-in-law’s birthday and she really wanted company to a pumpkin patch about an hour from the house. So, we packed it up and took it on the road. Amazingly, it worked beautifully! My kindergartner did all of his work in the car! Yes, I had to help him through prompts and some short lessons from the front but he was able to manage all his materials from his seat.
This was the begining of our car schooling adventures. Now that everyone is homeschooled, we find there are days we want to pick up and go visit family or we have a day packed with errands or there are doctor appointments or we don’t want use a whole “off” day for a field trip so we pack the bags and hit the road.
I challenge you to use your time wisely and if not at home homeschooling or car schooling would help, do it!
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