Katiebug1976 Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 We are getting ready to sell our house (and everything else) and take our family on the road full time for the next year. I know...a lot of people are going to think we're insane, and maybe we are. But we need a change and we're ready to go explore! Anyway, we have 5 kids still at home (ages 15,13,9,6, and 3). I am trying to wrap my brain around this whole process and decide what's important to take and what's not. I would love to hear from anyone who's been on the road what your priorities for curriculum have been. We use Teaching Textbooks for math, so right now I'm trying to decide if the textbook is really that necessary or if we can just get by with the discs & answer key...? I know my thoughts are not very organized right now as I'm trying to wrap my mind around so many different aspects of this change (and I'm becoming so unmotivated to continue with normal life at home since my heart in already on the road). I would appreciate any advice, thoughts, or links to info that you could share. Thanks so much!! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3girls4me Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 I have no answers for you but I'm following because we hope to do this within the next year or two!! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UCF612 Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 Not us but my friend's family is doing that right now. They have 6 kids. She just started a blog. Simplelifefullhearts.com 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Katiebug1976 Posted February 2, 2016 Author Share Posted February 2, 2016 Great, thanks!! I'll go check it out!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penguin Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 Hopefully, Kinsa will pop in here. If not, PM her. She did the full time road trip. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tranquility7 Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 Oooh, check this out - https://ditchingsuburbia.com/resources/fulltime-rving-families 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wintermom Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 Sounds exciting! Where are you planning to go, and will you be intentionally visiting historical sites? There are so many amazing resources at US National Historical Museums and Centres, with Junior Ranger programs, and they are very inexpensive many free. Will you have other places of interest to visit or specific people? With your oldest approaching graduation age, I'd probably want to somehow make the travel planning and/or destinations a form of "internship" that would be unique and concrete. For the younger dc, I'd also gravitate more toward life-skills and experiential learning and ditch textbooks and such. All the best with the planning and new adventure! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Katiebug1976 Posted February 2, 2016 Author Share Posted February 2, 2016 We don't (and probably won't) have a plan of where we're going until we get on the road and adjust to a new way of living. However, one of our reasons for wanting to make this change is for our kids to "live" history and not just read it out of books. So while we don't have an itinerary, we will be making stops at many historical places. I'm also starting to try to change my thinking about education so we can focus more on life skills. We won't totally ditch the books, but our focus is going to change a lot! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
My3girls Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 My husband is being transferred to Hawaii in June. The girls and I are going to take a year to travel the country before joining him. Maybe, we'll see you out there! lol 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaConquest Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 We have been toying with the idea as well. Trying to find a way to make it doable financially, and then we will be off. We have friends here in San Diego that just went full-time. Are you a member of the FB Group Fulltime Families? It's great. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Katiebug1976 Posted February 3, 2016 Author Share Posted February 3, 2016 No, I'm not. I've heard about Full Time Families, but we haven't joined any groups yet. We're still in the early planning stages...getting our house ready to sell. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 We don't RV, but most of my tutoring students are homeless and I've learned a few things about educating with nothing but what can be carried around in a backpack. Students crave a hardcopy math book. Digital math gets old very quickly. I'm not even sure why, but it does. Strayer-Upton has been the most successful backpack math. Saxon high school level books have worked with covers ripped off and just a section at a time being carried around, while the rest of the book was left with a relative or in storage. Which leads me to ripping up books. Books are not sacred! Rip those heavy covers off and rip out only the pages you will USE. Just the punctuation section out of a grammar book, or the section on drawing faces from an art book. Rip, rip, rip and throw away or store what you do not need right now. Books are here to serve us; we are not here to serve books. Art becomes important. You can do a lot with crayons. I have spent years aquiring art ideas that work with crayons. I don't have home wifi or a printer. A 3G Kindle paperwhite is worth the price if you can afford it. Don't try and use Chromebooks on public wifi. They see the public signals as risky and sometimes lock your whole computer down. Spend the money on Windows or Apple. I cannot live without an expensive large screen cell phone with unlimited data. I don't have a TV or landline. My cell phone is my only contact with the outside world. I have severe PTSD and memory loss issues and a bit of extra confusion, but still, when you start stripping away the things average mainstream Americans have, you can fall into a spiral of disoganization that a good cell phone can lift you out of quickly. If you are depending on tech to replace books, you are going to need several devices. Not only do some devices do some thing better, but often you will want several ebooks open at the same time, and it is incredibily stressfull and eyestraining to keep trying to flip back and forth on a single device. I'm on a cellphone now, using a bluetooth keyboard to type. And I am posting, before I lose all this by accidently hitting this one button that seems to close the window and there is no getting anything back. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 Having a printer or not changes a lot of things. Decide that before planning the rest of your curriculum. If you use AO stuff, you can send many of the pages to a Kindle to read offline. I have Windows with Chrome browser and some sort of thing I click, that e-mails the page to my Kindle. Even though I have 3G it needs to be hooked up to wifi to download the text though. But often I am at the public wifi to view and send the webpage anyway, so that is okay. It works with the Anne White Plutarch guides and the Towles Marco Polo book, I know for sure as I did that just last week. Some other stuff does just NOT work well in digital though, and if you have no printer it is better to skip them or do something else. As I said, math. My students and I find it torturous to learn math from a screen. I have had to do it sometimes with multiple students all the way back since about 2002 with one of my own kids and I just HATE it. And every student hated it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 I put pdanet on my cellphone and a B&N tablet that I got real cheap after trading in a partially broken ipad. The tablet does not see itself as being online through the bluetooth connection and won't download anything even a pdf. And the connection is jsut a mess and basically unusable, BUT!!!!! I can manage to hook up to my library website and Overdrive does seem to download somehow. So I can borrow ebook from my library using my Sprint cell phone!!!! That is nice late at night or during a rainstorm when I dont want to trek a 1/2 mile to the nearest public wifi. I can download Kindle whispersync sets to my phone. The screen is tiny to rad, but with the added audio support is okay. And then later, when I do get to wifi, I can get the same set on the tablet. For just purchased ebooks without audio, or free public domain titles, I can purchase those from Amazon and they download right through the 3G onto the paperwhite. So I have switched to a LOT more narrative type books, instead of trying to replace hardcopy books with pdfs. I'm always changing it and updating it. I'm pathetic. But the link to the Rainbow Curriculum in my signature, at least as of today, shows an example of a very few small hardcopy books and then a bunch of public domain narratives that can be downloaded for free onto a Kindle Paperwhite, or that are available as Kindle whispersync sets. I'm trying so hard to put together something that really does work with no printer, no home wifi, and no ability to store more than a small box of books for the whole family. I have had the priviledge to work with some amazing homeless adult students, homeless homeschool moms, homeless kids, and online low-income moms that have given me some amazing feedback, but it keeps coming, and I keep adding their advice. :lol: 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 Stuff I like, not listed on the pdf that I tried to keep as public domain as possible Phonics for Success. A new smaller and cheaper version of the revised Chalcedon edition of Alpha-Phonics that Don Potter recommends over the original. And I agree. Don Potter's First Reader's Anthology that lines up with Phonics for Success or the Revised Alpha Phonics. Writer's Express for composition. Especially the Gathering Grid idea for reports, and the proper instuctions for writing an envelope that are bizzarely absent from most curricula. Marvin Terban's Checking Your Grammar is mostly an overlap of stuff included above and in Harvey's grammar, but I am OCD, and this books's punctuation section is almost the perfect list to teach. With all my desire to reduce bulk, I still want my large print Merriam-Webster Dictionary. When I hook up the bluetooth keyboard to my cell phone to type here, I have no spell-check. And I want to look up words fast. I use that book several times a day. It feels painful not to have it at my side. And if I'm using the library Overdrive ebooks on the tablet, the dictionary doesn't work offline. Otherwise all I have in hardcopy is some public domain little books, Beechick's 3R's, Strayer-Upton, a couple art instruction pamphlets, a large print NIrV Bible, and Handbook of Nature Study, most of which I also have backup digital copies. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 (edited) So right now, for tech, I have a Windows laptop, the Android B&N Tablet, Kindle 3G paperwhite, and Sprint unlimited data Android large screen cellphone. And I'm doing okay. My Best-By credit is almost maxed out and I don't care. I tried to manage with less and it was just too hard. The chromebook was a fiasco. The older Kindle with out 3G was possible, but meant more hikes in the rain and dark to public wifi. Instant Overdrive library e-books on the tablet, and being able to lug it to public wifi for the whispersync sets is just heavenly. And the cell phone is my EVERYTHING. I pay my bills, get the weather, check-in here, get my e-mail, research things, radio, news. It is my connection with the world. I did try and funtion with less and it was SO hard. So hard. Having a home library and real bookshelves, TV, home wifi, a landline, etc are just different, in ways you don't realize until you don't have them. Edited February 3, 2016 by Hunter Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 Do you have a library card with access to a large city Overdrive ebook collection? Usually your capital city gives all state residents a free library card. And I mostly didn't list individual art books, because individual titles are not important, and you can buy and dispose, or borrow titles, but if you are on the road and without TV and many videos, your students and yourself are going to crave art instructon books. PDF backup is nice, but you are going to want to plan to have SOMETHING hardcopy around beyond my core suggestions of Drawing Textbook and Alon Bement's Energetic Line. The art books you rip and throw away. The face drawing instruction from the finger print Ed Emberly books are a must have. You will gradually aquire other pages you hold onto for awhile, and other books you will just use for a few weeks and trade in for news ones. Budget for art book knowing they are disposable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Katiebug1976 Posted February 3, 2016 Author Share Posted February 3, 2016 Wow! Hunter, thanks for all that advice! I didnt know about the state capital libraries...ill have to check with ours because our local library isn't that great. I have always loved hard copy books over books on a screen, but I'm going to have to find the balance somewhere. 😜 I'm thinking our downsizing will be more along the lines of trading in some of the books we are used to using for more hands on life skills kind of learning. There is a time and place for digital books, and I'm sure we will have our share of them on a Kindle or something, but one of our goals is to get our kids out in the world and learn from what's out there! 😠The more I type about it the more excited I get!! I just can't wait!! (I never in a million years thought I would be excited and pushing to move out of almost 3000 square feet and move into an RV with my hubby and 5 of our kids!!) 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 I spent some time living on a boat in another country at the ages of 12/13. The people on the other boats were lower-income and had been at it longer than us. The country we were living in was covered in mold and infested with roaches and termites, so even the people on land lived a more limited lifestyle than most Americans. If you can be creative and adaptable, you can do this. Humans have been living for a long time with less than the typical middle-class American and many still do. :D 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 And just know that a lot of what you think will work is not going to work. When you downsize suddenly, and lose SO many possessions all at ONCE you will not be able to predict how much is not going to work as expected. Like I had no idea how incompatible Chromebooks is with public wifi. The Android phone and tablet worked. Theory is not the same as reality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 You are going to find yourself stranded in a small place in some bad weather. You really need to be prepared for that. Hands-on is great on those nice sunny days when you are parked in the parking lot of some tourist destination, but not all days will be like that. But at least your bed will not be rolling with the waves in that bad weather. But seriously, if you have never been trapped in a small place with a lot of people for days at a time, you need to know what that is like. It is stressful and my experience is that some people handle that best by retreating into narratives and drawing and writing, and some people actually enjoy completing pages and pages of math problems. You will want a book on playing cards games, both group and solitaire, and you will want several decks of cards. I have heard that RVers, like my houseboat friends, trade paperback books. You do not want to bring any sort of set of books, that you wouldn't want to break up. You are going to want to dump and acquire things as you go, and so are the people around you. Sets of anything are bad. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Katiebug1976 Posted February 7, 2016 Author Share Posted February 7, 2016 Kinda, thank you for your thoughts and advice! We plan on making some "dry run" trips before completely moving in to the RV, but I hadn't thought of staying local for a bit...hmm...that's a very good point! I'll have to talk to hubby about that. I also figures school was going to change drastically this next year! I plan to try to keep up with math, writing, reading, and maybe spelling (if time allows), but as for the rest, I'm wrapping my mind around all they will learn at nature parks and historical sites etc. I'm kinda thinking we can do a bunch of our "book work" on traveling days when we are on the road...we'll see how that works. We don't use any online courses, so that's to our benefit...and I absolutely wouldn't mind being cut off from the outside world at times (Internet/phone etc). Dh's phone goes off so much right now it sometimes it feels like it's another part of him!!😱 We're ready for a break...just be a family and get to know each other all over again! I am looking forward to reading your blog when I can get a minute to sit at my desk top and look it up!! 😜 Thanks again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 7, 2016 Share Posted February 7, 2016 If any of your kids get carsick, they will not be able to study while the RV is moving, other than maybe audiobooks. Will the inside of the RV get hot when parked? There is a lot that gets damaged and spoiled at high temperatures. We didn't have to deal with that on the boats as much, but my ex-husband had an uncle that stealth RVed in a van, and his whole wheat flour spoiled rapidly, candles melted, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Katiebug1976 Posted February 7, 2016 Author Share Posted February 7, 2016 We don't have to worry about car sickness here...we have done several long road trips and that's not been an issue for us (thanks goodness!). I don't think we would have even attempted full time on the road if we had car sick kiddos. 😜 As far as the temperature, it should be fine as we will have heat and airconditioning to control the climate. But thanks for the tips. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted February 7, 2016 Share Posted February 7, 2016 Uncle didn't have any temperature control when he was not in the vehicle and couldn't even leave a window open, so temperatures were very high for several hours a day in the summer. And because he had everything with him all the time, and it was his home, it wasn't the same as the family car getting hot. It just affected small things, like not being able to stock up at all on whole wheat flour, and I don't remember what else. Weird little things I never would have thought of, if I hadn't learned them from him. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peaceful Isle Posted February 7, 2016 Share Posted February 7, 2016 How long do you plan on being on the road with the RV? Is this a temporary or permanent thing? We were on the road for about a year, but it was temporary and then moved to another state after that. That would make a difference in what we would or wouldn't use. :) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Katiebug1976 Posted February 8, 2016 Author Share Posted February 8, 2016 It all depends...we won't have an income, so $$ will really make the call. Our plan right now is 10-12 months (depending on our monthly spending and what we wind up spending on our RV set up). However, if we get out on the road and really like it, and find a way to generate some income it may turn into an extended/long term thing. Right now we just know we need a break from "normal" and traveling has always been a dream of ours. Our kids are growing up and we need some uninterrupted quality family time. So since we have the opportunity to do this for awhile, we're going to jump on it! 😜 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wonderfilled Posted February 8, 2016 Share Posted February 8, 2016 We have been toying with the idea as well. Trying to find a way to make it doable financially, and then we will be off. We have friends here in San Diego that just went full-time. Are you a member of the FB Group Fulltime Families? It's great. I was going to suggest this facebook group, too. We have friends who do this. They actually travel the world and get to do all sorts of neat things and I'm starting to get jealous. She has a blog http://traveldeepandwide.com/. I don't think the textbooks are necessary for Teaching Textbooks. We don't usually buy them and the one time we did, we didn't use them. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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