...and we all groan aloud at such a poor joke.
Aaaand now we move on to the real purpose of this post:
Making the most of your time in the car. For free.
We spend around 3 hours a week driving (two 1 1/2 hour trips). Seeing as how the 6 year old was unfortunate enough to inherit my propensity toward motion-sickness, and the 3 year old can't read yet, and reading while driving isn't exactly ... you know... safe, reading is pretty much eliminated as a traveling pass-time.
There are plenty of other ways to meaningfully fill our time, though.
Here are a few:
- Music. I posted about our simple approach to composer study here. We love listening to music while we ride!
- Scripture memory.
- Practice spelling words.
- Practice math facts.
- Learn Spanish vocabulary. How many foods can you name? How high can you count? Can you carry on a simple conversation? We even made up our little ditty recently to learn colors. To the tune of "Are You Sleeping":
Red is rojo, red is rojo.
Blue azul, blue azul.
Yellow amarillo, yellow amarillo.
Verde, green. Verde, green.
- Listen to literature and other 'educational' programs. Homeschool Freebie of the Day often offers mp3 downloads that easily fill a little time. Today we drove home listening to a 1950's radio program of The Passion of Christ.... read straight from the Gospels. We have Shakespeare and other old radio programs lined up for future trips. The library is another great place to check for audiobooks.
Those are a few of the activities we have evolved into over the past couple of years as we have spent more time on the road. What are your favorite ways to pass the time in the car?
We play I-Spy and we listen to audiobooks or our nice "dance music" (tobymac and Newsboys). Sometimes the best talks happen when we're in the car. :)LOL such school, I guess we have car electives.
ReplyDeleteMy kidlets don't get carsick (phew!) so we do much of our "schooly" stuff in the car--workbooks, number tracing, etc. Seems like more novelty than work when done in the car. And we LOVE CD books from the library!
ReplyDeleteWe spend a lot of time traveling, and again I'm reminded of how blessed we are. You see, we don't own a car. So our traveling entails others doing the driving. It's a lot easier when you're a passenger WITH your child.
ReplyDeleteWe spend much of our "wasted" time running errands. I haven't really been able to get any school accomplished during those trips so far. I think I am going to try to integrate some of your ideas to maximize our time out.
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