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“Pay careful attention, then, to how you walk – not as unwise people but as wise – making the most of the time…” (Eph. 5:15-16).

My family and I love to go on long road-trips.

My husband and I discovered we both were down for long hours in the car before we had kids, and we never stopped after they came. We especially love to road-trip during most people’s off-seasons (aka: when everyone is at school and work). I’d rather go somewhere and not fight a crowd, you know?

Thus, we will vacation during random weeks in a typical school year. Now, I am all about times of relaxing and giving our brains a rest.

However, there are some trips that I find I want to squeeze a little schoolwork in before and after we reach our destination.

I’m also a huge proponent of limiting screen time for my bears. With this in mind, the creation of “Auto University” was born, a blend of work and fun.

Ask my bears if they like Auto University, the answer will likely be no, haha. They’re boys under the age of 12, of course they’d rather have all fun (screen time) and no work.

Nevertheless, a parent’s job is to set appropriate limits regardless of if their kiddos agree or not. Plus, I built in a reward system so that the bears are much more willing to put in the work and get their desired reward.

Auto University goes something like this.

The Steps:

We divide our trip into two-hour blocks. The first 55 minutes we will work on a school subject. I choose subjects that are more car-ride friendly than not. We usually do history and science on long trips. (I’ll list some specific resources below.)

I set a timer on my phone so that we make sure we stop exactly at 55 minutes. Big bear is a stickler on this matter, haha. We then have a 5-minute transition period where we’ll put away any schoolwork and the bears will get out their screens and gaming devices.

I then set the 55-minute timer again and the bears get to play and zone out. The last 5 minutes we will put up all the games and screens back in the bag, (I don’t want any cracked screens).

We then stop for a bathroom break and take a few minutes to walk around and stretch before we hop back into the car and start our next two-hour block.

This schedule may seem overly-detailed or rigid to some, but frankly I find it helps keep our sanity in check on really long car-trips. If anyone has traveled over 10 hours in a car, you probably know what I’m talking about.

Getting through a two-hour block of time seems much more doable than thinking about surviving the whole 18-hour (or whatever) trip.

We always do the school hour first with the incentive that if they pay attention and learn well for 55 minutes, they then earn their next 55 minutes of gaming time.

Honestly, we’ve had some of our best learning time in the car. No one can go anywhere, and the bears are highly motivated to earn that gaming time.

For us, history and science are mostly listening/reading so again, a car-ride is an ideal time to tackle these subjects.

Now, this is how we do Auto University on our super long road-trips. However, we do a much more informal version of this in the car on a weekly basis.

Informal Auto University:

My family is located in the greater Houston area. Houston is big, Texas is big. That being said, between appointments, extracurricular activities, etc., we have a good bit of car time during the week.

I value the things we’ve chosen to do outside of the house. I’m not such a fan of the time it takes to get everywhere.

My next thought is not a revolutionary one, but about a year ago, it dawned on me that we could make the most of this car-riding time and get some school work done!

For these shorter spurts of car-rides we do a few different subjects. Right now, the go-to subjects are math and Spanish (as a second language).

Middle bear is currently memorizing his multiplication facts. I’ll usually pick a number and quiz him on a full column of the multiplication table.

Baby bear is learning numbers past 10 so I’ll usually just count with him. With big bear I quiz him on harder columns like 12 and so on.

The bears currently participate in an online homeschool Spanish program and are assigned Spanish words and phrases to memorize between sessions.

I will save these homework documents to my “homeschool” folder in my Google drive and can pull it up anywhere. All of my bears, even baby bear, can participate in reciting back the Spanish translation of whatever English word or phrase I say.

If our trip is over 20 minutes, we might even delve into a little history with an audio book (our favorite for the car is listed below).

Using our car-rides in this way helps me feel like we are making the most of our time during our school day. It also helps relieve some pressure off of all of us by being able to complete some school subjects AND participate in activities outside of the home.

Don’t get me wrong, we don’t always jump into Auto University every time we jump into the car. Frankly sometimes we just need a bit of silence or to listen to music and give our brains a rest.

Using wisdom always trumps a set-in-stone schedule in my book.

Resources that work well for us during Auto University:

• Story of the World Audio Book
• Homeschool Spanish Academy
• Apologia Science Text Books (Only on long trips when we have two drivers)
• My brain, haha, I’m keeping those multiplication facts alive in my memory too

What about you and your family? Do you do your own version of Auto University? I’d love to hear what works for you in the comments below!