Creating Family Travel Itineraries around School Curriculum Goals

We tell you how to create family travel itineraries and get a quality education anywhere in the world.

Who needs to combine study and travel?

Categories of families that often move around the world:

Freelance parents. They work remotely and are not tied to a specific location.
Parents whose work involves frequent business trips, but do not want to part with their child.
Children who are professional athletes. Regular competitions take them to different parts of the world.
Someone in the family has poor health. The family goes to spend the winter in warm countries or to treat a loved one outside of their country of residence.

The reasons may be different, but the actual problems remain the same. The main one is how to give a son or daughter a quality education in the conditions of constant travel? After all, studying and traveling often seem to be incompatible things. Another question is where to find assistance if a student doesn’t have time for assignments? Fortunately, in this way, they can get essay help from special services if this task causes problems. Also, they can turn to online tutors if a student lags behind in a specific discipline.

Why combine travel with curriculum goals?

If you combine travel with curriculum goals successfully, you will achieve the final result in the form of new knowledge, meanings, and experience:

A journey presupposes direct interaction of students with objects of natural and cultural heritage.
The student’s personal experience and objects of the city’s socio-cultural heritage act as sources of information about the surrounding world.
Students find the necessary information in various ways, combining visual observation, tactile and motor perception, searching for and analyzing information, and staging experiments.
The educational process is built not from the guide’s presentation of ready-made truths to their illustration, but, on the contrary, from the students’ personal feelings, observations, and research to generalization and formation of new ideas.
Activity and independence of the participants in the journey: each student can put forward their own versions and adjust them based on discussion with parents.
Knowledge of the world occurs in the process of collision of different points of view, which allows the student to rethink what they saw, compare their own position with others, and correct it.

How to create a curriculum-based itinerary

Preparation for travel

Preparation for a trip begins with defining its theme (title) and the idea of choosing objects for research and drawing up a route.

Involving students in the process of formulating goals is essential. It allows not only to develop the competence of conscious choice and decision-making, but also automatically turns the student from an object of learning into a subject who independently plans and implements their educational route. Research objects can be linked to a future profession.

Work on the route

The family should indicate which cities the route will pass through. You can make itineraries in every city. The objects for the route are selected in such a way that the distance between them is small, which will allow the journey to be made on foot. The key points of the route are determined by the logic of such a journey, the logistics of movement, and the resources (human, material, and time) available to the family. One of the mandatory conditions is the safety of the route.

The route sheet should clearly define the itinerary and the sequence of actions of the family when working in the urban or natural space. The questions and tasks of the route sheet should be composed in such a way that students can concentrate on certain objects, carefully examine them, research them, and analyze the information received.

The questions in the route sheet are open-ended; they do not imply monosyllabic answers and should stimulate students to put forward their own versions and discuss. The questions should be constructed in such a way that answers to them can only be found directly at the object, having studied it, and made logical conclusions.

Didactic materials

The following didactic materials may be included in the route sheet: maps, diagrams, illustrations, and links that can serve as sources of information. They also include: communication with city residents, seeking advice from specialists, researching in libraries, and using the Internet.

Interviews

During the educational trip or after it, in the process of preparing for the report, it may be necessary to interview someone. To do this, students should familiarize themselves with the rules of interviewing in advance.

Assignments

Assignments can be aimed at various types of creative activity. At the beginning, while students do not have certain skills, family members can help them. They direct and organize their activities, using questions and tasks from the route sheet. Direct prompts are unacceptable. If insoluble questions arise during the trip, the family member, without giving a ready-made answer, points out possible sources of information “beyond” the educational trip.

The final product of most educational journeys is associated with the creation of an essay, which is quite logical, since it is directly aimed at the development of the student’s personality, which is impossible without the development of linguistic thinking in a variety of genres.