It’s official, my family has embarked on our summer long road trip. We flew from Morocco (where we live) to the United States last week. We’re spending the first two weeks visiting with our friends and family in Georgia, but this Sunday, we will leave on a 5 week trip around the United States. Our first stop will be Buffalo, followed by Montreal, Chicago, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone National Park, Portland, San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, Las Cruces, Dallas and back to Georgia for a week before we head back to Morocco. Here is a Google map itinerary we have created for our trip:
View Summer 2013 USA Trip in a larger map
While we travel, my children, aged 5 and 9 will be documenting what they have learned. (Our 2 year old will just be along with for the ride!) My 5 year old is documenting his learning in a travel journal. We purchased a travel journal for him on our trip to Ireland in December. Each trip he collects pamphlets and pictures and tapes them into his travel journal. Then, he writes a sentence or two to go with whatever he learned or saw.
My older son documents his learning by writing on his blog – Traveling from a Kid’s Point of View. I require him to write 2 to 3 paragraphs, and he likes to add pictures of our vacations as well.
As a parent, I love to work on writing skills and talk about content connections with my children while we travel. As a teacher, I love for kids to write about their travels because it keeps them thinking about their thoughts. This metacognition decreases the “summer slide”. The students in my class are visiting places based on their summer scavenger hunt and then writing blog posts on their edublogs about the places they have visited. (Feel free to download my summer scavenger hunt for free from Google Docs.) Kids don’t have to travel far to learn something. Small day trips make great entries into travel journals!
How have you documented travel learning with your children or students?
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