Our days in Florida

I wasn’t sure if this idea of doing homeschool away from home would be one of my many Great Ideas that are better in my head than in real life. We still have a lot of school work to complete before we can end our school year, hopefully, at the end of May.

So, we had planned this as a “working vacation”. I created a binder for each child with the assignments for each day we would be gone. We would only do our five to six core subjects, rather than all of the work we typically do at home.

Each day of our drive, we were in the car for at least four hours, so I also included school work for those days. Doing school in the car went way better than I ever imagined. Unlike at home, when the kids are distracted by wanting to take breaks to play or get a snack, we didn’t have anywhere to go in the car. And it turned out to be a good way to make the ride go faster.

Once at our friend’s home in Florida, we mostly kept the same schedule we do at home. We would do school first thing in the morning.

We did several subjects outside by the pool.

CapableDad had his own home office.

Once we were done with school, we jumped in the pool to cool off.

And then, we usually spent the rest of the day at the beach. EverydayBaby stayed home and took a nap while her dad worked.

We spent lots of time building sand castles, searching for seashells and looking for ocean life. Our most exciting find was when we saw a large sting ray swimming around in the shallow water near our feet. We ran out of the water as fast as we could!

In the evenings, we would grill out by the pool, swim, watch a movie or play games. Since this is a rental home, the closets were empty. The kids created a clubhouse in one of the walk-in closets. A second closet they called their “auxiliary game storage”.

My friend who owns the house stocked it with games, puzzles and activity books. It was often difficult to pull the kids away from the games, even to go in the pool.

We all agreed that the best part about Florida was the slower pace of our lives. We weren’t constantly being pulled in different directions by the phone, places we had to be or other commitments. Even our daily drives out to the beach seemed peaceful compared with the fast pace of battling traffic where we live.

And even though we still did our school work, this definitely felt more like a vacation than home.

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