So you’re heading off on an Australian family holiday, and while you know it will be fun and exciting for the kids, you’re wondering how to take advantage of the amazing opportunity to help them learn without even realising they’re doing so. The great news is that travel is a great way to teach kids about everything from general life skills to history and mathematics.
The greatest thing about learning through travel is the fact it’s so far removed from the boring textbook style experience they’ll get elsewhere, they probably won’t even realise they are on an educational ride of their lives.
So how do you introduce child learning through travel? Here are a few tips.
1. Give your children a travel journal.
Travel journals are FUN and they aren’t just for older kids either! Children of any age generally love to draw, write or share their own insights into their lives when given the chance to be creative. Encouraging them to use these interests while on holidays or family road trips, is an easy way to guide their interests toward fun, educational outcomes.
There are lots of great options for kids travel journals, and it doesn’t need to be an expensive process. To keep things simple, our tips for creating a travel journal for your kids are:
Purchase a hard cover notebook from the supermarket, discount store or newsagency. An A5 size is portable and a great size to have in the car.
Before you leave let the kiddos decorate their journal using stickers, protective contact book cover or any other way they like.
Guide your children with the types of things to record in their journal but don’t enforce.
Ideas for travel journal content for your kids:
Draw maps of places you visit, places you stay, even your holiday accommodation.
Draw pictures of places, buildings, attractions, wildlife and anything else they see.
Leave blank pages when they write about attractions or the day’s events, so they can glue photos in when they get home.
Collect tickets, brochures and souvenirs that can be used to add texture and interest to the journal.
2. Track Your Holiday On a Map
This is a really fun thing to do with children of all ages. Get a suitable map that shows both your home and your road trip destinations. Before you leave home, place a marker on your home town/city then, depending on the age of your children, help them to plot your travels on the map, or allow them to do it.
You can either do this as a family, or give the kids a map of their own. You don’t need to buy expensive maps for this, you can simply print a map out from the internet before you leave.
After or during your trip, for older children, this gives them to opportunity to research distances between towns etc. It’s also great for them to plot departure/arrival times, stop times and locations and fuel expenses. By turning this into a fun adventurous exercise this helps your child learn a whole range of life skills and mathematical skills without it being boring and mundane.
3. Give your children a camera or video camera to use.
Wondering how using a camera can be educational. This exercise is lots of fun for children of all ages.
Digital cameras work best for this as children can see their artistic vision unfold right before their eyes, and there are no high costs associated with needing to print photos in order to see them. Recording their holiday by taking photos or capturing video of their experiences, allows your child to express their creativity, but it also assists them with language skills such as recounts (explaining something that happened or they’ve experienced in the past) as well as storytelling, art and culture.
Once you return home from your trip (or if you’re on the road long term, at any time) continue the encouragement of self-expression by allowing your child to create their own photo album. Allow them to organise and collate their images into pages in an album or scrapbook, and work closely with them to help them document their artwork with written recounts or descriptions. Alternatively, help them to create a collage using either just their photos, or photos, words, travel brochures etc.
Just Have Fun With It!
You’ve now read just a few ideas of how your family travel experiences can be educational for your child. Don’t be afraid to have fun, try different ideas and follow the lead of your child. Of course researching places, people, animals and other attractions that they have seen is a great way to broaden their knowledge and even if they don’t write it down, talking about it as a family is lots of fun and sometimes we underestimate the power of a simple conversation with our children and what they can learn from it. So if you feel that you’re time limited or your children won’t be interested in the options we’ve listed above, be sure just to talk, share and enjoy.
We headed off to Dubbo over the weekend for my brother’s 30th birthday. It was a 70’s theme and deciding to go against the ease of dressing in disco gear, after a bit of googling, we got a little creative: Do you know what our 70’s themed costumes are?:
This post is a link up with Trish from My Little Drummer Boys for Aussie Wordless Wednesday.
As you may or may not know we’ve been given the amazing opportunity to try our hand at shooting a documentary for Nat Geo TV as Nissan X-trail Adventurers. On top of getting the chance to experience this, we also get to decide our destination, Where would we like to take our next family adventure?
For us, this decision was actually made over 3 years ago.
When we travelled the Stuart Highway in 2008 from Darwin to Adelaide, we really had no idea what we’d discover. I mean, we’d seen images of Uluru on TV, we knew we’d take a detour into Kakadu, and we had to visit Coober Pedy for sure, I mean people seriously live underground there! Little did we know that the true spirit of Australia would capture our souls. We not only experienced things beyond our wildest dreams, but we discovered there were so many more hidden treasures out there we just knew we had to hit the road again to explore.
It’s taken3 years for the opportunity to discover a new region of Australia to appear. We’ve done plenty of short trips and camping trips, but nothing that isn’t easily accessible from home.
So, given this amazing chance to not only show other Aussie families the fun and adventure you can experience together on a road trip, but also choose our destination, we knew before we entered just where we’d go….
Adelaide Coast Line
Kangaroo Island was the place on the top of our list, followed Closely by returning to Melbourne (we fell in love with Melbourne the first time we visited) and driving the Great Ocean Road…. How blessed are we that we get to do BOTH those things while capturing the adventure for other families to watch on Nat Geo TV!
Our obsession with Kangaroo Island was almost instant from the moment we read about it. I remember arriving in Adelaide and reading the local paper (we always like to read local papers on our travels to get a feel for a place) and in that paper was an advertisement for a Wildlife Park for sale on Kangaroo Island. We read all we could about Kangaroo Island, and discovered that Australia had our very own “Aussie Galapagos” Island, full of amazing animals, untouched and gorgeous nature. We’re Wildlife lovers, so we dreamt about what it would be like to own a Wildlife park in such an amazing place. We knew that one day we’d return to explore this amazing paradise ourselves.
As for the Great Ocean Road, well that’s just a MUST DO for any Australian. It’s such a long way from our home base, we just weren’t sure when we would ever get the opportunity to do this stretch. Well, now we know I guess! At the end of February, flying into Melbourne and hitting the road in our Nat Geo Nissan X-trail to capture the amazing, amazing places and spaces all along the Great Ocean Road and beyond!
So there you have it, at the end of February, just a couple of weeks away, we’ll be flying into Melbourne, taking a road trip down the Great Ocean Road right through to Kangaroo Island, to show you all how amazing this part of the country is.
Do you have a dream destination? Do you have anything you’d like us to stop and see on the way? Let us know!
Sharing my photography is one of my favourite things, but sometimes I wish I had a video camera on hand!
This week I’m including some photos that were fun to take of a Monster Truck Show we went to earlier in January, and at the very end, something a little different… a Slide Show I just had to make to share a little bit of a Mishap during the start of the show. Enjoy 🙂
Each decade of our lives brings with it new perspective, new insight, new ideals.
As each decade passes, and I reflect on the me of years gone by, I realise just how different my perceptions of the world have become. If you’d asked me in the past what Australia Day meant to me, I’d have given a wide range of answers.
Some of those answers would possibly have included:
A day to celebrate our history.
A day to spend with friends and family.
A public holiday off work.
Being proud to be Aussie.
I’m guessing that for most people, Australia Day does mean something like one of the above, or very similar. But I’ve also come to know in recent years, that for some people, Australia Day has become a stark reminder that their lands were invaded and their culture stripped away slowly and painfully. Their culture is still clinging to a fragile existence in a country that doesn’t seem to care.
When I was Growing Up….
I was raised by a hard working “Aussie” Tradie, and the values he spouted over my childhood are pretty far removed from the values I hold as an adult. I grew up in the 80’s, a time of work hard for little, spread your money around as best you could, and raise your family in the Aussie, beer drinking, BBQ cooking kind of way. Where “Greenies” were ruining people’s jobs, and unless you were “white” you weren’t really all that important, and god forbid you questioned your own sexuality, that sort of foolery was intolerable!
In all fairness, my dad has either mellowed or become so tired of me ranting about equality and the environment he’s chosen to agree with me for the sake of peace! He’s a good man, but I’m so glad that our generation seems to question what we are “fed” rather than just go along mindlessly.
When I Discovered Australia’s Secret Shame!
Yep, you read it right, Australia hides secrets, ones that need to be blown into the limelight! Until my mid 20’s I’d never really left the safe surrounds of the coast, tourism areas or main country towns. I was blissfully unaware of what I didn’t know, and then a few years ago we set off on a camping trip from Darwin to Adelaide. So excited to see things like Kakadu and Uluru, we were looking forward to discovering the “real Australia”.
What we found was not only that there are places in this country more beautiful than you can ever imagine, but sadly that there are people in this country that are forgotten about, used for political leverage, and left to live in squalor in shameful slums that most of the country don’t even know exist.
We discovered that Indigenous Australians are suffering. They are being tucked away, their needs dragged out and spoken about only when a political party needs to gain a vote, or the government wants some of the land they occupy to grant mining leases and rake in cash. There are real people, real families, real stories and there is real sadness spread across the heart of our country. There is a real culture that is dying, much of which has been lost forever and this will continue to happen unfortunately unless change is made quickly. The reality is, so few of us realise just how bad it truly is.
Why Australia Day is Important.
Australia Day is truly important, because EACH AND EVERY PERSON IN AUSTRALIA IS IMPORTANT.
Australia Day needs to be a day to celebrate our growth as a country.
It needs to be a day to celebrate progression toward equality on all levels.
It needs to be a day that cultures blend and share, merge and combine for good.
It needs to be a day that we hold our government accountable to be sure they are truly leading our country in a way we can all be proud of.
It is a day where history must be acknowledged and a path to move forward TOGETHER is celebrated.
The truth is that you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it. I didn’t know, but I want you to just consider for a moment, the pain at having everything you have known ripped away from you, ripped away from your family just a couple of generations ago.
I want you to understand that raw emotion and raw pain, causes a huge amount of sensitivity around this issue. I want you to be brave to learn about the possibilities of acknowledging our past as a country and then standing together to move forward.
I am really very, very passionate about indigenous issues, and it saddens me that sometimes Australia Day brings about debate, name calling and sometimes even violence. I truly believe that we can find solutions, that the more people who understand just how “hidden” the realities of Indigenous issues in Australia really are, the more people who learn to discover for themselves, beyond what the media or the government report, but to really learn, embrace and understand.
It is then we have a chance to make a change, so that ALL Australians can be proud, so that we can all walk together as one, and so that indigenous poverty in remote Australia is put to an end!
I hope you all had a great Australia Day, it’s a wonderful day and we should all be proud of our wonderful country, just as we should be using our voices to ensure our country only gets better, stronger and becomes the safe haven for all those who live here!
Firstly that I am SUPER EXCITED! The second that I’m so nervous I just can’t explain!
We have an AMAZING opportunity to try our hand at documentary making for Nat Geo Australia!
A few weeks ago I entered a competition that’s being run by National Geographic AU and Nissan to find the Next Nat Geo – Nissan X-trail Adventurers….
Totally unexpectedly we recieved a phone call!!!
We’ve been chosen as one of 3 families to be sent off on an Aussie Adventure of our choice, to experience the Nissan X-Trail, and become the next Nissan X-trail Nat Geo Adventurers!
We really hope you pop back to our blog or stay tuned via Facebook to share the journey with us, and if you’ve ever had experience filming a Doco we’d love all the tips we can get 😀
