You’re driving along discussing how far the sun is from the earth when one of your kids wants to know if the song on the radio is by Taylor Swift, another one asks if you can stop by the store to get a starfruit because she heard about it from a book she’s reading, and then another one declares that he knows a shortcut home. The toddler takes this opportunity to throw his pacifier to the floor, and the nine year old steps on it while trying to pick it up. Of course.
In the span of fifteen minutes, you’ve covered all kinds of interesting information, as well as heard snippets of what is filling your kids’ heads all day.
Count it all.
Write it down.
It’s okay that you have incomplete discussions. You’ll circle back to them over time. Remind yourself that conversation is the homeschool equivalent of a classroom lecture.
Conversations are often best had in a car, anyway. It’s when you’re all trapped in one space; talking is the main thing that can be done in that space. Use it well!
Some Ideas
Pose a provocative question: “How many basketballs could we fit in that semi?” Brainstorm ideas, take guesses, figure it out when you get home.
Talk about the lyrics of a song.
Comment on the birds on the telephone wire, wondering which ones they are.
Ask about a game recently played or a book being read.
Talk in the car! Count it.
So much good education happens, literally, along the way.
If you find conversation challenging (maybe you’re an introvert or you haven’t had practice in thinking about open-ended questions that lead to good conversation), stay right here. More articles are coming.
You might also enjoy our Literature Program that gives you big juicy questions to use when reading a novel aloud to your children.
Brave Writer Literature Programs
One of our readers shared this UK experience with me via email and gave me permission to post it here. I love this: Walk and Talk
Good morning Julie!
As always I love your blog posts and the idea of your car conversations.
I’m in the U.K. where multi-car households aren’t quite as common as they are in your neck of the woods, so we have one car for our household and my husband uses it to drive to work; the bus journey would otherwise take him twice as long; 90mins rather than 45! He’d barely get home for the youngest’s bedtime!
(Brits are deffo not more eco-conscious, not at all! - just that car ownership is more expensive here and I think more homes don’t have garages or driveways - you have to park on the street outside your home, which can make more than one car a pain.)
Anyway that’s not particularly relevant except it means we don’t tend to have many car conversations. But what we do have instead are conversations whilst walking to places. Often relatively long walks (for little legs anyway); for example it’s half an hour’s walk to our town centre; 35 mins to the library; 45m to the train station, and even the bus stop is a 20 minute walk away.
I am not sure these are quite the same as your car conversations but there are definitely some similarities. I think the difference is that the conversation is more of a mixture of some of the kinds of thing you mention, but also a bit more commentary on what’s happening around you (as it isn’t whizzing past at the same speed as a car goes). Stopping to look at a Peacock butterfly resting on buddleja that’s found a home on some waste ground. Sow’s Thistle growing through a crack in the pavement. And that perennial favourite: door numbers; with odds on one side, evens the other, both my kids really cemented their understanding of odd and even numbers whilst walking with me to various places.
(On the bus or train we tend to read, or chat to other commuters; these journeys don’t lend themselves to family conversation in quite the same way.)
In fact we love our pavement ‘walk and talk’ time so much that at the weekend my husband goes out with our daughter for a walk rather than taking the car.
Funnily enough when we do drive somewhere as a family we tend to chat less; we are more likely to listen to music and sing along. (My youngest’s current favourites are the times tables songs from Numberblocks.)
Anyway I just wanted to share. I love reading these snippets about your home ed days. Very encouraging, always, and never prescriptive.
Kind regards
R
Thank you for this! Have you read https://alisonwoodbrooks.com/conversation-book/? I really enjoyed it and I feel it has definitely improved my conversation skills!