Turn Your Family Vacation into Real Education

Whether you're going skiing in Wyoming, museum hunting in Paris, sailing to Tahiti, or camping in South Carolina, when you take your kids on vacation with you, make sure to include opportunities for educational and teachable moments as part of your family vacation.

Learning can be found anywhere and everywhere, and can be quite a bit of fun, especially when it's not in a scholastic setting. Just don't try to structure the learning much. Just let things progress naturally.

Children often enjoy helping others in official capacities, and love having titled positions, such as a "Junior Travel Agent." Include your child while you are planning the trip. He can help compare hotels, flights, auto rentals. He can help research places online and at the library. He can even help you read the map, which is invaluable when you're on a driving vacation! Also, why not have your child write to the state tourism bureau for information?

Reading is not good during only the transportation sections of your vacation, but it's a great resource for learning about the place you're going via tour books, a story that took place there, or common phrases in the local language.

Follow what your child learned the previous year in school, as well as inquire what he will learn next year. Perhaps a location on your vacation might have some special significance to what he learned or will learn.

Other ideas for excursions include going on a factory tour to see how things are made, visiting a museum's gift shop first for postcards of things that are in the museum then finding them in the museum itself (you can even teach your children about art that way, too!), or tracing your family history using local records.

Vacation scrapbooking is becoming a common hobby for many people, and why not include your children in it. They can learn not only scrapbooking and organization, but also photography, collecting (postcards, menus, and brochures), and writing (stories about what the family did and the places that they went.

Finally, talk about what you see with your children. Counting lambs in passing fields, observing the foreign dress styles, and otherwise building your child's natural curiosities are great ways to make your family vacation an educational one.

Of course, before you have that educational experience, you have to first book your travel at www.kingarthur.myttn.com !