Life on the road Part 1 – Kids 24/7 in an 18ft tin box

So even from the title you can see – this is not a usual post.  When I was in Canberra I asked friends what they thought of the blog (thank you for the positive comments guys) and how it could be improved.  One friend suggested that it would be good to see a bit more of how we actually live on the road, not just the locations.  So this is the first of possibly a series of blog posts on how we live in a caravan travelling around Australia.

I thought the obvious topic for the first of my new style posts is the kids.  It was the number one question we were asked before we left, it is the number one question I get when I catch up with family and friends and a question about the kids is still the number one question we get asked on the road.

ARE WE THERE YET??????

So there is even a book now with that question and I am sure for every parent it is a familiar refrain. I was also expecting us to have to say – quiet back there or there will be no insert treat if that behaviour continues, OR Boys just stop fighting right now!  Really nicely we have not had to resort to much of this at all J  No our boys are definitively not angels and we don’t administer sleeping pills for the journeys.  Our secret – AUDIOBOOKS.  I LOVE AUDIOBOOKS!  We wisely (well in retrospect) bought a small blue tooth speaker I thought for having music in and around the caravan.  The speakers biggest use is in the back seat of our car.  We run audiobooks through my Ipod and Ipad and we can decide whether the parents in the front seat actually want to listen or not.  Mostly we do because the hours of driving are a bit boring for us as well. 

Where do we get all these audiobooks (because already we have gone through hours and hours and hours worth), firstly the generosity of family and friends and then the library system of the ACT.  We had borrowed a number of hard cds and copied those for use before the journey, but mostly we use the online aspect of the library.  From anywhere in Australia (where we can log on) we download ebooks and audiobooks.  From the time we start a story we very rarely get a peep from the boys until they get hungry.  We often have trouble getting them out of the car before the end of a story.

OPPORTUNITY SHOPS

These are a godsend.  We use them like libraries, buy books at one donate them back down the line, buying the next lot again.  The mix of books we get is obviously dictated by what they have, but that in turn means we pick up books we might not otherwise have thought about.  The other upside is that we are still finding things we don’t need or that we have overused (particularly some of the boys toys as they find new things on the road) so we occasionally donate a bag of our excess goodies as well.

Our other place to pick up books is book sale places in shopping malls.  Yep we still hang out in the odd shopping mall and I do keep an eye out for good sales on books.  The boys are reading a Tashi compendium we found in Newcastle for less than half price.  When we have finished with a new book it still goes to an opp shop with the others.  Although we are very attached to the Tashi so may have to send it home.

SO ARE YOU HOMESCHOOLING?

This has to be our most frequently asked question when we tell people we are travelling around Australia.  No we aren’t and I am glad we are not.  Travelling is exciting, challenging, invigorating, but also really tiring.  It would be a real struggle for us to add in formal sessions of prescribed learning on top of most of our days.  If our kids were older this would be a different story but they are still only 7 and just beginning their formal school pathway.

Having said we don’t do formal home-schooling – we do lots of learning.  First of course is all the learning we do on the road.  We are visiting new and amazing places, listening to guides and rangers, read interpretative signs and pamphlets and looking things up on the internet and in books.  We were recently at the Rainforestation in Kuranda learning how to play the didgeridoo from a local indigenous person.  He asked the boys did they know how a didgeridoo was made – Mr L gave him the full story chapter and verse.  The man was most surprised, as were David and I.  We asked him how he knew so much – he told us from Bushwacked and the Townsville Museum.

We do lots of reading, we read out loud with the boys, they do their own silent reading, and did I mention the plethora of interpretative signs we all take turns reading.  The boys have their own tablets and we have restricted the apps on these so they are educational.  We also play family games many with a strategy and/or maths element.  These include Monopoly, card games, Yahtzee, Scrabble and yep for fun Headbandz.  The boys are earning pocket money for the first time so they have to figure out how much money they have and how much they can afford when we visit markets (they are also starting to learn to haggle from this experience as well). 

The boys get involved in reading maps, working out distances (the how far are we along a walk is a good incentive to work out some maths), constructing material for this blog and are now picking up words in foreign languages as in Far North Queensland we have been meeting kids mostly from Europe.  We have a map on our table in the van and are tracing our journey on this.  We also left a map with the boys class so they can see where we are going.  To add to this and to provide a bit of more structured project work we design and send posters back to the school.  In our recent trip back the boys visited their class and even gave a power point presentation.

If you were to ask me where I think they are at present I would have to answer their reading is great, their general knowledge super, their confidence is excellent.  I will also admit they may end up a little behind in formal maths (you know x + y = z style) and probably physical writing.  I anticipate that next year we might have to focus on some aspects to bring them up to the rest of their class, but maybe not.  We do also have distraction bags in the car with workbooks and pencil cases for times when we stop for food and are awaiting our orders, or having lunch at a picnic table in the rain.

Like our real journey, the boys learning journey is also evolving.  David and I are learning to incorporate opportunistic learning better as we go along.  They boys are learning more so we change what we do with them, hopefully we are learning to be better parents as teachers.  We are about to do much longer drives when we leave the coast and head to the Northern Territory.  I can see an opportunity to expand some of our in car learning activities there (I am not sure even audiobooks will get us through 6 or more hours of driving). 

Hopefully this new style of blog post is of interest to at least some of you.  Please let me know if it is and if there are any other questions you might like us to answer.  You can do this by leaving a comment on this post or by emailing us at tcdstravelling@gmail.com.

I will end with a poem written by the boys (their class had also been working on poetry so they added the poem in some posters we sent back).  You may have noticed that wet weather has been a recurring theme for us on the coast.  So it maybe no surprise that the rain was a key topic for them to write about (this poem was after 4 days straight of rain).