teaching children on the road

Hi I Want Out

Simply ask the teacher, they will advise accrodingly. We travelled with our 3 kids at various ages. All the kids teachers give them maths, english and readers/books for their ages. We also got our kids to do their own daily diary. All teachers were very helpful when we did it and all of them said the kids would get a much better education. All kids caught up on the "other" work and none suffered in their reports because of it.

So enjoy and give the kids a great enriching experience.

Cya
Tripp'n
:)

theres also a remote teaching thingy teachers should also be able to tell you about it depending on how long on the road
steve

Hi to all;
getting a program from teachers will work fine and keep them in tune with their classmates,but keeping a scrapbook using info from tourist info centres will give them a good show and tell when they get back.Just get a map of your trip and follow it with the info.A journal will keep the english up to date and a log of fuel costs,site costs and general expenditure will take care of the maths and at the end it will be of benefit to you also.Take care and have fun,they will learn more out there than in a classroom,
regards Dave

Any teacher worth their salt will back you and nothing beats 1 on 1 learning .Anything you can incorerate into the trip to do with maths etc. use it so its part of the driving and stick to the basics.

They then can call thenselves Road Scholars.lol

All good advice.

Can I also suggest that you involve them in planning and recording the trip. Have an expanding file they decorate and use to store memorabilia of the trip. They could use one of those excellent books on Australian wildlife and/or a travelling companion that has snips of info on places visited. Kids love to read such stuff to parents and if you are interested, they will go for it.

My wife is an ex primary school teacher, and we have had a few trips where we pulled the boys out of school.
She went up and talked to the teacher to see what in particular they were doing, and we covered the main topics while travelling. Amazing what you can do in the car in an hour, something that could be a half day in class. Bribery and corruption are acceptable teaching methods. They usually catch up pretty quick at school if they have been through the basics.
The main thing we did was to give them plenty of maths by adding up distances and working out travel times (when are we going to get there?), counting dead roos, estimating the distance of a straight to the next bend, and the trip is the greatest geography lesson they will get. You may need to do a little research first to get the history, geology, land use, fauna and land types right.
One trip we did, the teacher asked us to bring a log back, like a travel diary they could share witht the class. They had to keep a record of daily temperatures and weather as well. I think weather was on the agenda at the time.
Be careful what you decide to do, it does become a pain after a while chasing them to get it done. Try and get something different for each week or few days.

Hope this helps.

Hi,

Sorry to disagree with the above posters, but, the legislative act in each state is very clear about the compulsory nature of school.

And whilst the "system" turns a blind eye to short, say 2 to 3, maybe 4 weeks, away from school you are required to ensure your children attend a school or provide the equivalent 5 hours a day of lessons for longer absences.

The truth is, you would have to be extremely unlucky for any state's dept of education to actually enforce the letter of the law in this regard.

So, the above suggestions are fine if you are just doing a 2 to 4 week trip but if you are doing a longer journey, say 2 months or more, you need to contact the applicable department of education for whatever state you are in, and ascertain what distance learning program you need to undertake.

All states have a very good mode of distance education delivery for all age groups.

I would also agree with the above posters in regards to the beneficial education children get whilst on such a tour around the various parts of Australia.

If you have a laptop I would suggest you take that and grab a demo copy of Kidspiration, available from www.inspiration.com (there are Australian distributors) and numbers up and numbers up 2 available from www.nh.com.au

The Kidspiration software is very good for your kids to map out where they have been and write text explainig the various events of your holiday.

If you are lucky enough to own an Apple iBook I would strongly recommend Comic Life, available from http://plasq.com and it opens up some extremely valuable learning activities your kids could engage in if you also have a digital camera, that would help "journalise" their experiences whilst travelling.

Regards

Graham

thanks for all the advice. will start planning our trip now.

Hi. We are both teachers, and took our kids out of school for 6 months and taught them ouselves whilst we travelled around the country. Have to agree with all of the above (except Graham). Whilst Graham is right according to the letter of the law, you can't enrol children in distance education in WA unless you are away for more than 6 months. The implication therefore is that an absence of anywhere up to this time is acceptable.

Spending time on real life learning opportunities is a fantastic way to learn and it doesn't have to be a chore for everyone involved. It's meaningful for the kids and fun for the parents. Six to twelve months of this in primary school should not hurt most children. If your children are having any difficulties before you go then I would strongly suggest that you talk with their school. Otherwise - have fun - we learn in many ways and a family trip is a classroom experience outside the classroom!