How we homeschool while traveling full time
Those of you that have known us before all this traveling and homeschooling on the road, know that we have been homeschooling since Dakota (our oldest) was in 2nd grade. He is now entering his senior year of high school! We have tried many homeschooling programs. Below we will go over how we homeschooled at home before traveling and how it is different now. Prior to traveling I had our sunroom in our home converted into everything homeschooling. In that room we kept a bookcase full of educational books. That looks a little different now that we are living in such a small space. I’ll touch on that in a little bit. My objective at that time was to simplify my children’s education and make it thorough and engaging to each of their learning styles. I did this by clustering the subjects together.
Here’s what I mean… Depending on what we were learning in science and history that day dictated what material we were using to learn reading, writing, spelling, & grammar. I would take our books and pick out appropriate paragraphs that I could then get them to practice reading the paragraphs out loud, writing the paragraphs on paper for their penmanship, pick spelling words out of the paragraphs to learn, and dissect the paragraph sentences into the grammar components they were learning at that time. Adding to that, we completed math assignments, experiments, and many other hands on learning tasks such as fort building, fire starting, cooking, and crocheting. With this approach I would essentially teach the same subject matter to my kids and build on the assignments depending on what grade each child was in at the time. This looked a lot like this…
We would be learning about the Civil War, both children would learn about key dates, people, how the US looked before and after the Civil War, etc. As they got older their knowledge and understanding would be expounded upon and assignments would become more difficult. They might have a writing assignment such as, how the Civil War changed America and what they think America would look like now if the Civil War never happened, or the South won. These assignments would allow them to use more critical thinking as well as expressing a well thought out opinion and backing that opinion up with historical examples. The beauty of homeschooling is the ability you have as parents to cater to your children’s unique learning style to make learning fun and engaging.
One of my favorite memories homeschooling my two oldest was when we were in our first couple of years of homeschooling. We had chosen to learn about Africa this year in history. I chose a book written by a family that travels and stays with families all over the world. Each country in this book has the history explained, geographical location, population size, climate, etc. It also had information about the family they stayed with, including what a weeks worth of groceries cost and family recipes. It was an awesome book! I bought another ebook online as a companion to this one. It had printable maps and activities for each country in Africa. They went perfectly with one another. Back to the story… Dakota and Sydney were learning about one of Africa’s countries and in this particular area the women worked and came home and “waited on” their spouse. The book had a picture of the family and the wife serving her husband a cup of tea. Dakota zeroed in on this and said that he wanted to move there when he got older cause he could live life like that! We all had a good laugh!
Our first year in our “new to us” RV, we had a bookcase behind the jackknife sofa. If you are unfamiliar with this, a jackknife sofa folds from a couch into a bed, like a futon. When we needed to get any of our homeschool materials we would fold the sofa down, grab what we needed, and put it up. It was very convenient. At this point we were using paper books 100% of the time and had a great collection, but the RV was too heavy. We worked like this for a couple years until we got our new RV in 2020 at LazyDays. We did not have great storage space in this RV and we didn’t have a bookcase hidden behind our sofa either. We decided with this next school year we needed something different. It wasn’t long before I got a booklet in the mail from Alpha Omega Publications. This mailer had all their curriculum laid out and I was browsing to see what we would do for the next year. That’s when I first saw one of their online programs called Monarch. 
Monarch is an online homeschooling program for grades 3-12. It is compatible with Windows or Mac and for a monthly fee, a homeschooled child can have access to their five core subjects: Language Arts, Math, History, Science, & Bible. They also have many electives including foreign language available. After reading through the brochure and researching online, we decided to give it a try. I’m so glad we did! It has been so easy transitioning to this! The website is easy to navigate. In their calendar you can pick when the school year starts, what days they will complete each subject. (They automatically have Monday – Friday chosen for you unless you want to change that to something different. You can add holidays, field trips, sick days, etc and the website will automatically readjust their assignments so they don’t have anything to complete on those days. Monarch also makes it easy to download report cards and final grades. You even have the ability to change what percentage is equal to what letter grade. So, if you want 90%-100% equal to an A or 93%-100% an A you as parents can decide that. The program automatically grades their assignments, with the exception of written/essay type questions and will email you if their grade is below standard. I can’t say enough great things about it! It has certainly made homeschooling on the road a lot easier! I hope this all makes sense. If you have any questions about online homeschooling, homeschooling on the road, what computers we use, when our year starts, how we navigate the holidays with school or any other question that comes up, you can email us or leave a comment below. Homeschooling is passion of mine and I would love to be of help!
If you’d like to read an article written by our kids, check here.