Let's Get Planning: Learning on the Go!

Linking up with Kelly.

We live in a semi-suburban, rural area.  My children are very involved in multiple activities.  This translates into a lot of time in the car!  Any activity requires at least 25 minutes, sometimes an hour, drive each way.  All this running around is exhausting for me great for the kids, but it was making completing all our work difficult.  The solution, school in the car!  Now during these drives we could just try to ignore the "He's touching me!" "She's bothering me!" struggles enjoy quality family time, or we can use some educational distractions enrichments to help pass the time.  Here is our school on the road plan for this year.

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I really wanted to introduce the children to the great composers of history, but how and with what time?  Then I found a selection of these on cassette tape for a steal on Cathswap.  We tried them out and my kids were entranced.  I purchased the entire set for this year.  What I like best about this series is that is retells the story of each composer's life interspersed with their works from each time period.  At the end there is a "Mini concert" of each composer's best works.

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This is another gem that I picked up second hand.  We have the original series on cassette tape.  Although the Cd or DVD sets are close to $50, they are worth every penny.  Sr John Vianney has such a gentle way of presenting the Faith in a loving tone.  It is completely mesmerizing. 

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Twin Sisters Music Productions has a number of products that are perfect for learning on the go.  Christian Book Distributors carries numerous mp3 downloads.  We will be using States and Capitals.

We are also using History Songs and Geography Songs from Audio Memory Publishing.

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We are continuing our study of Latin with Song School Latin.  We have a portable DVD/Mp3 player to watch the videos once of twice a week on the go.  We try to listen to the accompanying CD at least three times a week to help get that vocabulary stuck in our head! 



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My children really enjoy read alouds and audio books.  In addition to our Morning Meeting read alouds, and Unit Study read alouds, my husband reads to them for forty minutes every night from selections of his own choosing.  However, that isn't enough for this literature hungry family.  We have exhausted the audiobooks at our local library, so I have been happy to find numerous free downloads online.  With the help of an MP3 player and this speaker case, we now have more books to listen to than we have hours in the day.  My plan is to listen to at least 6 books over the course of the year.  Here are my selections Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Eight Cousins, The Red Badge of Courage, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Anne of Avonlea and Peter Pan.

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To supplement our geography study, we will be listening to classics from around the world.  My big four list is this:  West African Folk Tales, Japanese Fairy Tales, The Heroes,  and American Indian Fairy Tales. 

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Lastly, comes science, which I hope to find a way to explore more deeply on the road.  We will be listening to the following books, The Burgess Bird Book,  The Burgess Animal Book, and The Insect Folk.  I also found all these wonderful episodes of Mr. Wizard's World on Youtube.  I am trying to find a way to download them to my Kindle so that we can take it on the road.

How do you study on the road?