One of the greatest things about homeschooling is the flexibility the schedule provides and one of the reasons we decided to make the switch was so we could travel as a family. Want to go away visit family for 18 days? No problem, bring school with you and do it where you are!
So we did. But one thing I hadn’t considered before actually traveling with my homeschoolers was how much “school” consists of! While away, I have been keeping our regular school schedule, expectations and tasks which meant I had to bring the majority of our school “supplies” with us.
While some items are not really travelable, like our calendar and other items are not really necessary like some of the texts we’ve been using, there is a lot that goes into just getting through a few weeks of school and the haul that accompanied us looked like this:
Journals and notebooks
White boards and markers
Lesson books we are currently using
Reading books and lessons
My planner
Tablet
Hard drive
Pencil pouch
The journals and notebooks consist of each girl’s daily writing journal, Honeybun’s science notebook and her research notebook. I considered leaving the last two home but since we plan to do a big unit on dinosaurs while gone and I want her to be able to keep track in her notebooks (though in hindsight, we could have left the notebooks in lieu of one smaller blank book which could have been used for the dinosaur unit).
The whiteboards are an essential part of our homeschooling day. We use them for our daily spelling exercises as well as handwriting and sometimes math work.
I’m not using a lot of text books right now but we do have a spelling curriculum we are using as well as a few workbooks the girls are using for different things.
We’ve been reading the Kirsten books in the American Girls series for awhile and I found a unit study for the books with reading comprehension questions and different activities Honeybun has been completing so naturally we had to bring the books along.
My planner is where I keep track of all we do each day for school work.
We bougt the girls a tablet to use when we decided to homeschool. Honeybun uses it for her research projects and I loaded a few handwriting, math and reading apps for them as well but they don’t get play often, usually only when we are away from home (like on the airplane).
My life is on that hardrive (in addition to school things, it also houses all my blogging things and ALL of our pictures). Since I’m not using a set curriculum, I’ve been taking advantage of Teachers Pay Teachers to guide my instruction with the girls and all the stuff I’ve downloaded is on the hardrive, ready to be printed out when and where we need it.
While I didn’t bring a lot of supplies like crayons, scissors and the like since I knew my mom would have those, I did bring pencils and the pens I like to use in my planner.
