Car-Schooling

We just spent 2 days driving from Ottawa to Nova Scotia. We've been doing the annual trip since moving to Ottawa 12 years ago, but normally have been doing it in 1 day. It is a brutal 16 hour drive doing it that way, but in exchange you get 2 extra days of vacation - so it is a toss up. But we've recently decided that we are better off taking our time to smell the roses, as it were. Rather than a grueling day beginning at 5am, we can casually get up at 7 and be on the road by 8, then retire for the day around supper time. And in the process, spend more time with the boys turning it into a wonderful educational experience.

We have always been big proponents of home-schooling, even if we did end up sending our kids to Public School. There is a really excellent Public School around the corner from our house, with an extremely diverse ethnic mix, so we decided in the end that it was most important to expose our kids to that. Besides, home-schooling can still be done even when the kids are in Public School, and learning should not end when the bell rings at the end of the day. We've always taken every opportunity to turn what we are doing into an educational experience for the boys, and that is no different on a long 2 day road trip. Here are some of the things they learned ...

When you are traversing 4 provinces, it is a natural way to teach about geography. Fortunately, a good friend of ours gifted the boys a few days ago each with their own atlas - one got one of the world, and the other got one of Canada. They insisted they be able to take them along on the trip, and of course the Canadian Atlas came in very handy the whole way - it allowed our oldest to follow our journey and read about various things along the way. In addition to learning about geography, we were also able to include micro-lessons on history and culture, as we passed right through Canada's French province (Quebec), and then Canada's only bi-lingual province (New Brunswick). And of course, the French in Quebec is not quite the same as the French in New Brunswick, since they come from different waves of immigrants.

As we traveled south through New Brunswick, there were more geography lessons. We watched the forests as they gradually changed their makeup. To the untrained eye they may appear the same from Ontario through to Nova Scotia, but in reality one big change is that the cedars slowly disappear along the way - we have very few of them growing wild in Nova Scotia, and there are quite a lot in Ontario. There were also numerous farmers' fields along the way, and fortunately my wife grew up in farm country and can identify at a glance what is growing there. Things like flowing fields of yellow canola are easy to spot - potatoes not so much to my eye at least. But to her, not so.

Geology was on the menu as well. When roads get made through the rolling hills of New Brunswick, engineers often blast through a hilltop such that the highway has fewer ups and downs. This creates cliffs alongside the highway with millions of years of geology exposed. And fortunately my wife is quite knowledgeable in this area, as well. As we crossed the Nova Scotia border there were geography lessons galore. The boys have already heard about the highest tides in the world, and the Bay of Fundy is quite visible along the border with New Brunswick. With its mud flats and sand marshes, there are plenty of Biology lessons as well.

And as we dove deeper into Nova Scotia, there were of course lots of lessons in history - in particular, their family history, to help them learn about their particular place in the world, and where they come from. Here is where your grammy went to school to learn to be a teacher, and so forth.

So many people these days think they need TVs in the backs of their vehicles to entertain the kids on trips like this. As though somehow kids do not get enough TV these days. It is sad to see them squander such opportunities. In reality, we have found that the number 1 factor in happy kids on the road is really good car seats - and in Canada that means Britax, and only Britax, since they are the only premium seats available here. It makes sense - if a child is not comfortable on a long journey, of course it will be miserable. Since we discovered this important tidbit early on, our kids have made two long trips like this every year (there and back in each trip) since they were infants, without a peep of ill-temper. They learned from a very young age to appreciate the adventure of the trip itself, since life is after-all about the journey, not the destination.