Vacations that Teach: Living Education

I love history in any size, shape, or form. More often than not, I combine learning more about our family history (genealogy) with major historical events in places we have come from in our migrations. My husband especially loves aviation history. Our daughter loves fashion design history. One of our sons loves anything that teaches about television and movie history. Our other two boys like any history that puts them out of doors!

We are a military family and our travels have enabled us to visit many places. Several of those places were important in the building of our great country: the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, the Capital Building in Washington, D.C., and the Punchbowl, USS Arizona, and Diamond Head Crater in Hawaii. Other sites remind us of the beauty found in the hills and dales of this land we call home: the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the lighthouses and beaches of North and South Carolina, and Pikes Peak in Colorado. Still others we have seen in movies, or read about in books: Chimney Rock, North Carolina (where Last of the Mohicans was filmed), Elizabethtown, Kentucky (where Elizabethtown starring Legolas, er, uhm, I mean Orlando Bloom was filmed), and the Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow villages in New York (where author Washington Irvin penned his famous work The Legend of Sleepy Hollow).

Most folks call these trips a vacation. We like to call it school, or a living education. The internet is filled with many great websites that will help you turn your family vacation into a learning experience. One of my favorite places is the National Park Service and National Register of Historic Places teaching website called Teaching With Historic Places (TWHP).

Last year our family incorporated a recent trip to Colorado into our lessons for the year. We had visited the Adeline Hornbek homestead, located in the Florrisant Valley of Colorado during the summer while visiting family. We had a sweet park ranger do the unthinkable and let us enter the ground floor of the cabin (shhh… don’t tell anyone that, ok!) to take pictures of the cabin. We were able to see the cloth and newspapers that had been used for insulation. The ranger did an awesome job and gave us a great beginning lesson but we (I) wanted to know even more! We came home and I started looking on the internet for information. I found everything we needed in the FREE lesson plans provided through TWHP. The lesson included floor plans of the cabin, maps of the area, historical summaries on both the subject of homesteading and women in the Victorian era, and more. The plan also includes a list of supplementary resources. The search engine is helpful in linking more than one subject matter because you may search by place, theme, time period, skill, or curriculum standards (i.e. is the plan geared towards history or social studies).

The lesson plans do not solely have to be used for history or social studies either. They are multi-tasking lessons, you might say. This year I really want my three boys to improve upon their creative writing skills. We can use the TWHP by using places that show up in the skills category of the search engine. We already have our interests peaked by experiences with places in North Carolina that show up in this category, like the Little Kinnakeet Lifesaving Station, for instance. Mammoth Cave in Kentucky is also listed in this particular search function and so we may take a side trip there this summer since two of the three boys will be visiting their grandparents in nearby Louisville for a few weeks.

Opportunites are all around us for learning. We just have to open our eyes and take advantage of them! So, where are you going on vacation?!  Oh, and by the way, feel free to view our family album of the Hornbeck Homestead at: http://www.mikeandsallie.com/hornbeck_homestead/.

Sallie is an off-again, on-again homeschooling mom to her 4 children, ranging from elementary to high school. In her writings, she discusses the challenges of homeschooling a child with disabilities and offers insight to those who sometimes feel all alone in a round hole world. Please visit her at Seaside Tales

Tags: education on the road, field trips, genealogy, historical events, history, military families, military homeschooling, Military Life, Teaching With Historic Places

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