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Turning Car Time into School TimeFamily Commutes can be Educational and Fun
Time in the car doesn't have to be wasted time. With imagination, a few simple resources and a sense of fun, driving time can become educational time.
Whether children learn at home or in a school environment, chances are they spend more time in the car than parents ever imagined possible. Today, children have more opportunities than ever for extracurricular activities, ranging from sports and performing arts to scouting and after school programs. Where the once dreaded “s” word - socialization, or more correctly, its lack thereof – was the primary concern for homeschoolers , there’s no shortage of outside activities these days. And for homeschoolers, there’s also the added necessity of having children along for ordinary errands. The “Auto”didacticAuthor Diane Flynn Keith recognized the problem a few years ago and coined the phrase “Car Schooling” to describe activities and ideas she used to enhance the time she spent in her car shuttling her children around. Car schooling, she says in her book by the same name, is an “alternative approach to homeschooling and afterschooling,” designed to improve everyone’s experience in the car. Some of the things she suggests parents probably do without even thinking about it: audio books and sing along tapes. But parents can sneak in some education at the same time. There are cassette tapes that feature multiplication table rap, geography mnemonic songs, and musical biographies of composers and musicians. Most bookstores carry a good complement of educational tapes and CDs, and there are many online resources for more. New Twists on Old GamesTurn old standards like round robin story telling and scouting for license tags into educational fare by throwing in new vocabulary words, or adding or subtracting numbers on tags and seeing who can get a certain number first. Truth or Dare can be “Decade or Dare” and become a history game. Take turns naming a decade (say,1880-1890), and each person in the car has to come up with an event that happened during that time. Determine some silly but still education consequences, like saying the alphabet backwards. If certain questions can’t be answered in the car, be sure to take the time to find out sometime that day, so no one goes away with erroneous information. How about 20 Questions, done to the tune of science or geography or any other subject you or your children enjoy or in which they (and parents) can use some improvement? Keep some general reference books in the car for this one, and for the Decade or Dare game. Keep books and flip-cards of word games, logic puzzles, and mind games handy. A great language arts booster that kids rarely regard as educational but that fits the bill quite nicely, is that timeless old stand-by “Mad-Libs.” Mad Libs are collections of quirky little short stories that are missing valuable features like nouns, verbs and adjectives. Take turns filling in the blanks to create some wild tales, and to develop an enduring sense of grammar at the same. Better yet, come up with some Mad Libs stories of your own. Online Resources for Learning on the RoadThere are plenty of free online resources to print out and keep on hand at the Discovery Channel’s Brainbooster Archive. There you can find questions to stimulate lateral thinking, like, “What do a cow, a shoe and a baby all have in common?” A tongue, what else? How about a doctor’s office, a post office and music? A scale. So don't just sit there waiting at the light -- make the most of your time on the road!
The copyright of the article Turning Car Time into School Time in Homeschooling is owned by Theresa Willingham. Permission to republish Turning Car Time into School Time in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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