Family Vacation Notebook

Posted by Brenda | 0 comments

Last summer for our family vacation, we decided to tour the Eastern states and see all the historical sites on our way up to visit my parents in Vermont. We hadn’t been that far as a family before and it was a BIG deal to be able to do this. Especially for a homeschooling family!  There were tons of places that I wanted to stop, so I began researching.

Weeks later, we had an itinerary and then I started preliminary packing (in my head)….then IT struck me. What on earth were all 5 kids going to do for 4-9 hours every day in the car?

Were we crazy? I was ready to call it off.
As I began thinking about all the things to occupy time in the car it dawned on me.  Wait, we are homeschoolers!  Give us a notebook, blank notebooking pages, fun worksheets, stickers, maps, podcasts, cool markers and pens and we’ll make a Summer Vacation notebook.  In the style of how we study everything else – notebooking!

I found many resources online and here are a few that pertained to our trip and could pertain to any family vacation:

• Enchanted Learning states pages
  
• Enchanted Learning state flags
  
• Vacation memory book (I enlarged and modified this)
• 13 colonies - label them
• Liberty bell info
• Label the airplane (for DC Air and Space museum) or Wright Bros. museum
• Looking at Airplains, National Air and Space Museum
• I downloaded numerous free podcasts from Colonial Williamsburg
• Colonial Williamsburg coloring and activity book
• History Scribe notebooking pages (I already had this)
• Jamestown replica, free print out
• Printed out games like Road Trip Bingo, Scavenger Hunt and Battle Ship from Moms Mini Van

I also made sure there were these things in each notebook:

• Blank pages for drawing and writing
• Page protectors to slide postcards, National Parks ranger worksheets, and brochures in
• A pencil case with markers, stickers, stamps and other goodies
• Printouts of maps of our destinations like Jamestown, Williamsburg, Monticello, National Air and Space museum etc. so we could plan our activities before we arrived
• List of podcasts and Cd’s we could listen to for each state

Guess what? We’re going on another trip soon and the children have pulled out last years Vacation notebooks and begged me to make another for this trip. I’m off to start the whole process all over again!

Brenda is a homeschooling mother of 5, who has a wonderful husband encouraging her to be the best woman that God has created her to be. Together they are very intentional about spending time together as a family. She considers her daily life with her children as her ministry and has found many avenues to encourage others to live a lifestyle of learning. She is the founder of an online homeschool community, Our Lifestyle of Learning and a curriculum review site authored by a group of well-known homeschool bloggers, Curriculum Choice. She blogs about their homeschool journey and family traditions at Tie That Binds Us.