If you’ve dreamed of fulltime RVing after your kids grow up and move out, it may not be necessary to wait. As the number of fulltime RVers hitting the road increases, more and more younger parents with school-age children are finding home schooling provides a broader, more rounded education than traditional schools provide.
Chelsea Gonzales loves to travel, and she was determined not to stop when she had children. So she did what felt the most natural to her: deciding against traditional schooling and hitting the road instead. The Gonzales family started RV living more than two years ago when their son was about 4, but they didn’t pause when he was ready for kindergarten, and they’re not stopping anytime soon. Schooling takes place in the RV and on trips to museums, zoos and aquariums.
“Last summer, we were studying the Revolutionary War, and we went to a lot of the cool Revolutionary War museums,” Chelsea says. “We weave our history, language arts, and science together, and it helps him and me get a better understanding of how all of these things fit into the world,” reports Crixeo.
The Gonzales’ family is home schooling on the road. There are no records of how many families are home schooling, but according to the Department of Education, close to two million, or 3.5% of American children are home-schooled. A road-schooling Facebook community has more than 12,000 followers, and a world-schooling one has about 1,800.
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we decided to HS when our son was 3YO in 2006. After we went to headstart to enroll him and decided not to after a breif introduction.
we have been HSing since 2009, entering 9th grade this year. we are lifetime members of HSLDA. We dontate to various HS groups, belong to various HS Co-ops and do all our book work at home offline. by hand. I know, the horrors.
By HS we do not mean Public School At Home, we mean HS. Which has nothing at all to do with PS.
We did do online work through various places years ago, but we could see where all that was headed and switched over . We have done Monarch and ACE, and our son loves his ACE curric. We get all our supplies from Chrsitan Books.com for a good price twice a year. We spend about 2K on his curriculum a year give or take, bookwork anyway.
Outside of this he is quite capable, has outside friends and is very motivated with lots of his own ideas. He maintains his own PS3 hardware and software, he also maintains his own TV, and can order parts and fix his TV when need be, he can maintain and repair his own bike, he can install maintain and run dual boot on his computer, he knows fluently all OS on desktops, and mobile OS. He is very good at critical thinking, is capable of doing all basic chores and basic cooking and is fluent in freezing food. He will not eat off the shelf food before reading the label, and has been sick 4 times in his life. last time was April of 2010.
He is taking classes at Hillsdale College right now, and scores in the upper percentile.
It was the right decision for us, and we made it years and years before we ever decided to go Fulltime in 2012.
HSing fits with FT , but for us HS happened before the idea of FTing was ever even considered.
There are some wonderful online curriculums out there, but one does need to do some serious critical thinking in order to ascertain whether they are fact based.
Unfortunately,the ACE curriculum is somewhat lacking in the “critical thinking” department (unless, by “critical thinking”, one actually means “anti-science”):
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/leavingfundamentalism/2012/05/07/top-5-lies-told-by-accelerated-christian-education/
This is a very thought provoking article…
I send my kids to government school, and THEN de facto homeschool them nights, weekends and Summers to correct bogus history (“uncredited slaves wrote the Declaration of Independance!”), health (“Vegan is the ONLY healthy diet!), and endless self-hatred agendas (telling my first-generation hispanic sons they are responsible for slavery because they “look mostly white”…WTH?). In math, 2+2=5 is fine because its “close.” Lizards are amphibians in science.
Last year our Superintendant explained his goal was “to bring our educational quality [down] to the same level as surrounding schools because providing our kids a better education isn’t fair to the city children [sic][sick!].” The school board endorsed his concept of equality by giving him a raise and five year contract renewal.
When I took my kids to Kitty Hawke, NC… they got unapproved absences for missing the week they completed in an hour with me… So, yeah…no doubt at all that RVers actually seeing historical and scientific sites are providing a better education…
As far as home schooling on the road, all parents are not qualified for such an important endeavor. There are so many school districts which allow students to enroll in online courses from Kindergarten thru grade 12. The child is then garuanteed to receive an accredited course which will allow for a smooth transition to college. This is something that some parnents of home schooled children may not consider when making that decision. Mainly because that is so far down the road. The best part is most of these online schools are free, because they are part of a local school district or state education system…..