Tina Dean is the founder and editor of the family Friendly Oz Camping Guide.
Taking your kids out of school for several weeks when you go camping and travel Australia can be a difficult choice. If you can include the usual school holidays and add a week or several weeks, it will impact a bit less on their lessons. It depends at what stage they are at school as it’s easier to take them out of primary school than secondary school.
Contact your child’s school and teachers and explain when you are going away and where so the teacher is fully aware of your plans. In my experience all the teachers had no problem with them missing school for a few weeks. Some of them said ‘they will learn a lot more’ as we were travelling Australia and where quite happy for them to go. A few teachers gave them work sheets to do or a novel to read while they were travelling and asked them to do a daily diary of their travels.
My family have had two 6 week camping trips, the first in 2000 & the 2nd in 2003 where my 3 kids were taken out of school for 4 weeks each time as we included the June holidays both times.
The first trip we went on my kids were 7, 10, and 12 years old, the eldest being in the first year of secondary school. We travelled from Victoria to Central Australia, to Darwin, Kakadu and back down through Outback Queensland and New South Wales.
The second trip they were 10, 13, and 15 so this time 2 were in secondary school. This time we travelled from Victoria to Alice Springs, on the Tanami Track to The Kimberley, around the Gibb River Road, then to Katherine and down the Stuart Hwy to home.
The diaries that they made and the photos we took are great to look back on. They added an entry in the diary each day, with a few paragraphs, noting where we travelled to or from, what they had seen and experienced. Then they included a small brochure. postcard or cut out pictures from larger brochures.
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