Why Reading Books Is So Important For Experiential Learning
When people find out that our family homeschools while traveling, we often get asked how we balance our kids’ educational load with being able to get out and explore all the places we visit. The thing is, in many ways, traveling the world while teaching our kids actually makes parts of their education easier than if we chose to stay in one spot, because a lot of our travel is the education.
That’s not to say that we don’t do any book learning. We do! Book learning and a set curriculum might not make up the largest part of what we do, but books do have an important role to play. In fact, mixing a consistently challenging written curriculum with periods of intentional, educational travel allows our family to live a “both/and” style of life, where we fill our kids’ lives with both books and field trips!
Book Learning vs. Experiential Learning is a false dichotomy
The idea that learning should be done through either the use of a set curriculum or through the experiential hands-on learning tends to miss the point. While it is possible to learn a great deal through focusing on either one of these methods, children’s education tends to be a lot more thorough and well-rounded when both methods are used.
That’s because book learning and experiential learning both work best when they support each other.
You can think of the learning process as being a little like building a tower out of blocks. If your tower only has a single supporting column, building a tall structure is much more challenging than it would be if you added in other supports. Having more supports creates a much stronger base to build on, and allows your structure to soar to higher heights before you run into problems.
In the same way, engaging with a variety of learning methods helps kids to more effectively grow their knowledge. In the places where a written curriculum might have gaps, educational field trips can fill them in, while a healthy amount of reading can do the same for the Field Trips by providing the background knowledge necessary to help kids better understand what they are experiencing.
How Reading Books Supports Experiential Learning
If you’ve read my blog in the past, you already know that I’m a really big fan of experiential learning. And for good reason!
Experiential learning has been shown to be an extremely effective method for helping kids to obtain a strong understanding of big picture concepts. Topics like why certain historical events happened the way they did, the motivations of the people involved (on both sides!) and an overarching understanding of how local cultures affected global-level events are all big picture items that can be learned on an educational family trip!
However, while there are huge benefits to be had from almost any family travel, making sure your trip is an educational one requires an extra measure of intentionality and preparation.
Basically, it means doing pre-learning with your kids.
What Is Pre-Learning, and Why is it Important?
There’s some old advice about public speaking that says that when you’re speaking you should tell your audience what you’re going to tell them, tell them the thing, and then tell them what you told them. If you’re familiar with that advice, you basically understand the concepts teaching kids anything.
Pre-learning is, at its simplest, just the process of telling your kids what they are going to be learning about on your field trip. (Post-learning, on the other hand, is going over the information again, after your trip!)
At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be all that important. After all, shouldn’t they just be able to learn things in the moment? But the fact of the matter is, if you want your kids to be able to get as much educational value as possible from your trips, pre-learning is can help boost your family trip up to the next level.
I’m reminded of a time my family went on a road trip to visit some friends in Phoenix, Arizona. On our way into Phoenix our kids insisted that the desert landscapes that surrounded us were empty, and devoid of anything interesting. However, during our time there we stopped by the White Tank Regional Library and Nature Center, where we read through several books on local plant species and identified several species of cactus on a nature walk.
From that point on, my kids were constantly pointing out the different plants that they could identify, and they found several different species that we hadn’t previously known about. In their minds, the desert had transformed into a completely different landscape, despite not actually changing at all!
This is a perfect case for showing how book learning can support experiential learning. Sure, we could have just taken our kids on a hike in the desert to see what we could find, but by taking the time to do some reading beforehand we were really able to maximize our time in nature. If we had not done so, we may have been able to teach them some of the same things we got from the books, though I would have still had to do the research for myself. And we almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to recreate the feeling of new discovery that our kids received from identifying cactus species that weren’t in their books.
How First-hand Experiences Support Book Learning
In the same way that book learning can help support experiential learning, first hand experiences can help kids understand new concepts they read about in books.
Field Trips allow kids to see places and things first-hand
One of the most obvious examples of this is simple object recognition. Have you ever had an object that you’ve never seen described to you? Even when the person describing things does a good job, most people still have an incredibly difficult time visualizing an object that they’ve never seen. Pictures can help, but not all experiences can be captured in a picture.
Field trips give kids the chance to experience locations and activities first-hand. They don’t have to wonder how it feels to stand next to a monument like the Great Pyramid if they’ve been there in person.
You can also use more modern educational aids to help kids understand, like video lessons or VR demonstrations. However, in-person field trips are qualitatively better than virtual ones, and will continue to be so unless VR technology improves significantly more than I think is likely.
Experiential Learning gives learners context for understanding new information
Do you know that fuzzy brain feeling that happens when someone tries to explain a concept to you that you don’t really have the context for? It could be an explanation of advanced mathematics when your last math class was Algebra 2, 20 years ago. Or it could be your kids telling you all about how a very specific game mechanic works in a game you’ve never even heard of. In either case, you hear the words but the information just doesn’t stick.
That happens because you lack the context necessary to connect the information to anything relevant. Essentially, you just don’t know where to put the information or what bits are important, and so your brain just lets all of it drop. The same thing happens when kids are presented with specific information that they don’t have context for.
Ideally, reading a book on a topic would provide a steady flow of specific information that helps you build up the context that you need to understand a topic. Conceptually, it’s a bit like buying furniture from IKEA. The pieces are there, and if you follow the directions, you should end up with a successful final product. However, just because you have the directions does not guarantee that things will end up put together correctly!
Field trips are the way that we see, first hand, how things are supposed to go together. It’s like looking at a reference model that we can use to help us interpret the written directions we find in books.
Looking at a completed furniture set in a store doesn’t necessarily transfer into being able to piece together your own furniture. But seeing it as a whole can really help when you’re trying to decipher the instructions! It gives you the context you need in order to understand the things you are reading.
In the same way, family field trips can give your kids the context they need in order to know what to do with the information they read in their books. It gives them a place to put it so it doesn’t get lost.
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Adding Books to your next Family Field Trip
Of course, knowing that you should add more books into your educational travel and knowing how to add more books into your educational travel are two separate things! What kinds of books should I have my kids read? Should they be reading them before the trip? On the trip? Do I need to travel with a suitcase full of books??
All great questions! And, unfortunately, all of them depend pretty heavily on your particular family circumstances and where you’re traveling. Let’s take a closer look.
What kinds of books should I have my kids read? (Educational vs Entertaining)
I know that a lot of people feel like if their kids are reading for education that the books they read should be educational. They want their kids to be reading non-fiction books so they can learn real things. But here’s the thing. Books don’t have to be non-fiction to be educational! In fact, my family has learned all kinds of things from reading stories that are absolutely not educational.
A great example of this is the way my family got ready for our most recent trip to Egypt. In preparation for our trip, we binged the Kane Chronicles books by Rick Riordan. We chose to listen to them as audiobooks in the car, which meant we got to enjoy them as a family, and we were pleasantly surprised to find how much we learned about Egyptian mythology!
How much educational reading should we do in preparation for a Field Trip?
I wish I had a more solid answer for you, but honestly, this depends a lot on your kids.
I will say that if you want to make sure your trip is educational, doing some form of pre-learning is essential, and reading books that relate to your trip is a great way of helping your kids understand the context of what they will be learning! We regularly choose books that are either set in the area we’ll be visiting.
It’s also a really good idea to read related books with them after the trip as well. Then, when things they learned about come up in the book, it can really help cement the lessons.
This can sound a bit intimidating if you’re not already doing it, but really it’s as simple as pausing when you see something you want them to remember and asking, “Do you remember when….?” It’s a super simple technique for helping your kids make the most of their trip and it can be a great time for reminiscing!
So… Do I need to pack a suitcase full of books?
Only if you want to! My family actually has travelled with entire suitcases filled with books, but mostly just on the trips where we know we’ll be stationary for awhile. (We just finished up 7 months in Marsa Alam, Egypt.)
Generally, we try to bring a few larger, non-fiction books on the areas we’ll be visiting that our kids can look through to get a better understanding of the history, culture, animals, or whatever other topic we want them to be focused on during our trip. We typically look for books from major educational publishers like Usborne or DK Books for this, as they often have books that do a great job of engaging kids while keeping things educational.
However, I don’t particularly like lugging a suitcase full of books around. It’s surprisingly heavy! So, for most of our books we use our Kindle readers and eBooks. Most libraries offer a ton of great eBooks that you can borrow, and it’s pretty simple to get them connected with your Amazon devices using Libby.
For full-color books, you’re going to want to read them on a Kindle Fire or other tablet, not an e-reader, but for most books the Kindle Paperwhite makes for a much better experience. We use both on a daily basis!
Ultimately, while we love living a life filled to bursting with epic field trips, our trips wouldn’t be nearly as educational if we didn’t also make good use of a variety of written resources. Reading about the places we visit and the different topics we explore there is almost as important to our kids’ education as the trips are themselves!
