Today Jasmine Filmer, one of our Road Trippers Hall of Fame nominees, is sharing how she educates her kids on their family road trip.
My husband and I had been talking about doing a trip around Australia with our kids Max and Tess (now 8 and 4 years) for a while – but talking about it and actually making it happen are two very different things! It wasn’t until about eight weeks before our intended departure date that we actually sat down and discussed our intended route and the places that were on our ‘must see’ list.
We have done other trips in the past (16 weeks on our honeymoon up to Alice, Broome, the west coast and then home along the Nullarbor), and various expeditions with the kids, like Cape York in 2009, a month doing Cairns to Cooktown in 2011 and various trips up into the Victorian High Country, but this five-month trip was certainly going to be the biggest and hopefully the best! We figured that Max and Tess were both old enough to enjoy more of what they’re seeing, and Max has become a very keen fisherman so the time up north was bound to be a hit.
We are now on day 127 of our five months away and it has been great to spend some quality family time together. The kids have been brilliant, and although we think they’re starting to get sick of us, we have managed to survive living very closely together for over four months now!
When you’re at home there are school and kinder teachers, grandparents and neighbours all chipping in to teach and discipline your children – and it’s been more of a challenge than we expected to do it all on our own. Max is in Grade 2 and has been doing well with the Excel Activity books that I stocked up on from Aldi before we left, and has posted two ‘projects’ back to his classmates. Tess is in kindergarten and has really thrived from having one-on-one time learning letters, sounds and generally just soaking up all the new things.
We have a laptop with us and have made good use of our ABC Reading Eggs (online) subscription as part of our education portfolio! Max’s favourite homework is working out the kilometres that we need to do the following day and estimating how long it will take us. He has done loads of reading too, everything from the Fish Finder Magazine (Barra Bible!) to Diary of the Wimpy Kid and Roald Dahl novels.
I think if we had our time again though we’d probably enrol him in Distance Education as it would have given us a more structured learning program for him. Neither of the kids have DS’s or any other gadgets (except an MP3 player each) at home, but we relented and purchased a couple of DVD headrests before we departed. The rule is that when there’s something interesting to look at out the window, the DVD remains turned off (but for the days on the Stuart Hwy up to Uluru they were a priceless).
You can read more about the Filmers adventures on their blog, Off Exploring with the Filmers.
