Not Back to School: A Roadschooling Panel on Littles, Middles, High Schoolers, and All the Curriculum We've Tried

It's that time of year again. The back-to-school pictures are all over Facebook. The Target and Walmart aisles are stuffed with folders and lunch boxes. And if you're roadschooling, you might be sitting in a campground looking at your kid doing math in their pajamas, thinking, that's not really my season.

This episode.... and this post is for you.

On this week's episode of Learn to RV The Podcast, I sat down with three other full-time RV moms who each do this a little differently: Kristina Bram of Traveling with the Brams, Rhea Gibson of the Wandering Rocks Family, and Ashliy of Wander About Full Time RV. Between the four of us, we've got littles, middles, high schoolers, and one gap-year kid, and we talked curriculum, community, and what it actually looks like to educate your kids RV style. No bell schedule. No hallway passes. No one right way to do it.

The Mindset Shift Nobody Warns You About

For a lot of families, the hardest part isn't the curriculum. It's unlearning everything you thought school was supposed to look like.

Kristina put words to something I think a lot of us feel.... homeschooling and roadschooling is not public schooling, and if you come from a teaching background (or even just a "we all went to public school" background), you have to actively unlearn the idea that there's a right way to do this. There's an actual homeschooling term for it: deschooling. It's the process of stepping back and relearning how to teach your own kids without the rules you assumed you had to follow.

For Kristina's family, that shift came out of COVID from watching her kindergartner and first grader stare at a screen for six hours a day while their teacher taught a room full of other kids. That disconnect from "the matrix," as she called it, is what eventually led them to the road.

Littles, Middles, and High Schoolers Are Not the Same Job

One of my favorite parts of this conversation was hearing how differently each age and stage plays out on the road.

With littles, Rhea's advice was simple: don't overwhelm yourself trying to make homeschool look like public-school-at-home. Fifteen to thirty minutes of focused time with a young child goes further than you'd think, and there's an enormous amount of education happening in play alone. Don't blink - that first year goes by fast.

With middles, curriculum tends to get more structured, not because you're trying to control them more, but because they start needing more structure to handle the variability of life on the road without it turning into a fight. And it will occasionally turn into a fight. All four of us agreed on this: if curriculum becomes a fight, ditch it. It doesn't matter how much you paid for it or how far in you are.

With high schoolers, the conversation shifts to some bigger questions from dual enrollment, gap years, what "counts," and how much independence to hand over. My own gap-year daughter is a good example of how that doesn't have to look like a five-year plan. We didn't force a decision about what came after high school. We just kept traveling, and she started working alongside us in the business.

When Curriculum Has to Be Rebuilt Around Your Kid

Some of the best conversations happen around what to do when the curriculum on the shelf just doesn't fit the kid in front of you anymore....  especially kids who learn differently.

Three of my seven kids have some form of dyslexia, and for years that meant cycling through program after program that wasn't built for how their brains actually work. What finally changed things was working with Russell Van Brocklen and his story-based approach to teaching dyslexic learners — turning my son's entire curriculum into a Clone Wars storyline, complete with standing orders instead of worksheets, because that was the only thing that would get him to read.

If you want the deeper dive on that whole journey — the signs we missed, the moment it finally clicked for our family, and what actually helped — I wrote all about it here: Is My Child Dyslexic? It pairs perfectly with this episode.

The Curriculum Lightning Round

We couldn't do a roadschooling panel without talking actual curriculum, so here's the rapid tour of what's worked (and what hasn't) across our four families:

• Konos — the unit study program that started my own homeschooling journey, three volumes thick and built entirely around hands-on learning
• Life of Fred — a math curriculum told through story, for the kid who insists they hate math
• The Good and the Beautiful and Not Consumed — language arts, science, and Bible-based options Rhea has used with her littles
• Math with Confidence — Rhea's pick after moving on from a program that "didn't work for that math"
• Gather 'Round Homeschool — a centralized, theme-based curriculum that finally stopped the daily fights in Kristina's house, where each kid took turns picking the unit
• Miacademy (K–8) and MiaPrep (7–12) — the online program both Kristina's and Ashliy's kids eventually asked for, complete with the ability to click a button and take a random Tuesday off
• Prodigy Math — a free math game where you battle dragons to solve equations
• Teach Your Monster to Read — the free phonics game that had my son reading in a British accent for five straight years
• Notebooking Pages — printable pages that travel well and let each kid document a trip their own way

And the two things we'd never go back to: writing your own curriculum from scratch (Kristina learned that one the hard way, printer casualties included), and any program that turns "social studies" into nine pages and a test.

The Best Classroom We've Ever Had

When I asked everyone for their favorite classroom on the road, none of the answers involved a curriculum at all. 

That's the beauty of it, and it's also the permission slip I want to hand you if you're the mom staring down this season feeling like she's not doing enough: you are. What works for Ashliy might not work for Rhea. What works for Rhea might not work for us. Your kids aren't behind. They're just on a different road.

Keep the Party Going

If this episode stirred up that "we're really doing this our own way, and that's okay" feeling, don't let it fade with the school-supply displays. We've got a whole post on how to actually celebrate that instead of quietly powering through it: Let's Celebrate! The NOT Back to ROADschool Party! Consider it your invitation to gather your people, wherever you're parked.

And if you don't have your people yet, Road Schooling Resources is a free group inside Learn to RV — no membership required, just a few questions and an agreement to the group rules, because there are kids in that group and I take that seriously. You might find you're parked right down the road from somebody else in there.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of Learn to RV The Podcast  or you can watch it on YouTube wherever you get your podcasts. We are also NOW ON SUBSTACK! 

Keep the wheels turning.