7 Great Ways to Add Education to a Family Road Trip
Is there anything quite as American as the family road trip? Whether you’re taking a road trip as a way to save money on getting to a destination or making trip itself the focus of your travels, hitting the road as a family is a time-honored tradition as old as the roads themselves. Or older, if you count the Oregon Trail.
Often, road trips are made out to be basic transportation, a simple way to get to the destination. But with a bit of effort and just a touch of pre-planning, the family road trip can also be a great vehicle for education and family fun!
Here are 7 of my favorite ways to add education into our family road trips!
Learn about Navigation on a Road Trip
Let’s start with the obvious one: Navigation.
Not so long ago, the ability to read a map was an absolutely crucial part of everyone’s education. I remember sitting at our kitchen table with my parents and plotting out the different possible routes to my grandparents house, then having to calculate out the distances each route would take so I could choose the shortest one. It was… not my favorite exercise. But it was a stepping stone on my way to becoming a full-time traveler and lover of geography!
Today, with Google Maps to plot out our destinations for us, it’s probably not surprising that families aren’t plotting their trips out on paper maps anymore, but the basics of navigation are still important! One of the things you can do with your kids is to look at your route ahead of time on Google Maps and find places of interest along that route. If your trip will be longer than a single day, you can also have them help choose a place to stay, as well. (We usually use road trips as excuses to go camping!)
It’s a great way to get kids more familiar with the geography of your route, and can help you come up with fun things to do on your trip, as a bonus!
Admire (and learn about!) the scenery as it passes
As we drive across the country, my wife and I often call attention to the changes in landscape that we see and ask the kids what changes they notice. You can lean into this as much or as little as you like. Some changes in environment are way easier to see that others, after all.
Whether it’s a change in the kinds of trees that you grow along the road, a change from mountains to plains, or spotting wildlife that you’ve never seen before, simply focusing your kids’ attention on the things outside their window can be enough to spark their curiosity and engage them in learning.
When we see something unusual, we also like to do quick internet searches to dig a little deeper. There’s no telling what you’ll learn!
Stop by State Welcome Center Rest Stops
Especially on longer trips, it’s so important to take frequent rest stops to stretch and, if you’re doing it right, to learn more about your surroundings! Highway rest stops are often little more than some vending machines, picnic tables, and restrooms, but that’s not always the case!
The first rest stop after crossing into a new state often doubles as a state tourism welcome center and can feature exhibitions that show case the different things that make their state special! One of my favorite state welcome centers is the Alabama welcome center on I-65 where they had an entire Saturn IB rocket standing up outside! Sadly, that original rocket was deemed unsafe, due to weathering, and has been removed, but as of May, 2025, Alabama has announced that they are working on a replacement for it.
Another great welcome center that stuck out for us was on I-90 as we entered South Dakota. They had a large stone tee-pee statue outside that was really neat, and a small learning center inside for kids with materials on Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills.
Every state has history worth learning about, and these Welcome Centers are the places where they work to let visitors know what that history is! Their like tiny, free museums you can visit while passing through!
Learn about Local Cultures on a Road Trip by Trying their Foods
If you’ve ever heard the “melting pot” vs “salad bowl” comparison for cultures, you may be tempted to consider America a single, large culture from sea to shining sea. But when you really start looking, it’s almost immediately apparent that there’s actually a ton of cultural diversity on display in America! I love that about our country, and believe that we should learn about and celebrate that diversity on the regular. And I firmly believe that the easiest way to start is by exploring these different cultures’ foods!
It can be extremely tempting to stick to drive-throughs and gas station snacks on a road trip, but taking an hour to get off the highway and find a local mom-and-pop can be an educational and refreshing way to enjoy your time on the road.
Passing through Louisiana? Grab some Cajun food! Made it to Texas? Try a BBQ brisket sandwich! Chicago has pizza. St. Louis has ribs. Memphis does pulled pork. Even if you can’t find a local specialty to try, you can still make your food stops educational by choosing non-American foods like kolaches (from Europe), pho (from Vietnam), or street tacos (from Mexico)!
Watch billboards and signs for learning opportunities
Some of my favorite educational road trip adventures came from stops that I hadn’t planned on making until we saw them! Roadside museums, national forests, and even an archeological dig site(!) have all made an appearance in our travels because I saw a sign that said, “Turn Here” and took a chance.
One such example is the Museum of Osteology outside of Oklahoma City. All things considered, it’s a fairly small museum, but it’s completely packed with animal skeletons from around the world! We took a chance on it, thinking it make a fun 20-minute stop and ended up spending nearly 3 hours there doing a skeleton scavenger hunt and helping our kids dissect owl pellets. (Yes, really.)
Another example is the Mitchell Prehistoric Archaeological Site and Museum in South Dakota. We were on our way from Sioux Falls to Badlands National Park and spotted the turn off sign for the archeological site and decided to take a look out of curiosity. The museum portion of the site was pretty standard for a small museum, but the area surrounding the archeological dig site had some really neat activities for kids, like learning how to size pottery shards or how to identify animal bones found in the area.
We wouldn’t have ever made a trip specifically to see that site, but because we kept our eyes open while road tripping, we ended up with a really fun side quest!
Instill a Love of Nature by Camping to your Destination
Hotels and Motels definitely have their place on road trips, and I’ll admit, we make liberal use of them when traveling during bad weather. But, as long as the skies are blue and it’s not too cold, we’re way more likely to be camping!
Camping is a great way to spend some extra time in nature while also saving some cash on lodgings during your road trip. National and State parks and forests will often have low-cost or free campsites available for visitors, or you can opt for paid campsites if you prefer amenities like electric hook-ups. I use websites like The Dyrt to find suitable sites while on the road.
This does take a bit of pre-planning compared to staying at a hotel, but nothing too serious. All you really need is a tent and enough bedding for your family. But if you plan on camping a lot, it’s worth getting some nicer gear so you’re more comfortable.
Learn about literally anything on a Road Trip by listening to an Audiobook
Most educational opportunities on road trips require you to stop and explore your world a bit, but sometimes you might want to add some education to your trip but also don’t have the time to take those longer exploration breaks. That’s where audiobooks come in!
My family loves listening to stories together during our travels, and, while not every book we listen to is strictly educational, most of the books we choose do have at least some educational aspects to them. We like to choose books that are related to our destination in some way, like how we chose the book Silverswift on Audible to listen to on our way to Cumberland Island, Georgia because the book is set there. While it’s a fiction book, there was just enough about our destination there to get the kids excited, and we were able to do some quick research on our phones to find some true facts to share with them!
Other times, we choose a book on a topic that we’re interested in, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with our upcoming trip, like when we listened to Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology.
It’s a fun and easy way to get the whole family learning, with the added benefit of spending time together while you listen!
