Home schooling and the big lap – here’s how Camp Winnie do it

Now onto their second big lap around Australia with the kids, Lisa and Shannon from Camp Winnie invite us into their motorhome to talk about home schooling.

Can’t be bothered reading? Watch the video below from Camp Winnie to learn more about home schooling on the road in Australia, the different options available, and what works for them.

The different options for schooling on the road

In Australia, it’s illegal to just take your kid out of school with no education plan whatsoever, and unfortunately, each state has a different set of rules and regulations. With some being easier than others when it comes to home schooling.

Regardless of your home state, there are two main options when it comes to school on the road, distance education and home schooling.

Distance education

Distance education is basically online learning in a virtual classroom with an actual teacher. So you will need to have access to reliable internet and be online at certain times.

Home schooling

Home schooling is where you are the teacher. You’ll need to provide the education department with a plan on how you’re going to educate your children and provide them with opportunities to learn. The plan will need to be sent off and approved.

What Camp Winnie did

Camp Winnie went with the home schooling option. With a lack of reliable internet when travelling in the outback, distance education wouldn’t work for them. And while creating an education plan was daunting at first, there was plenty of online help and support available to assist from those that have already been there and done that.

At the end of the day, what works for you will boil down to state regulations and your personal preferences. Lisa, Shannon and their two girls, Chloe and Jess (aka Camp Winnie) did their first big lap when the girls were aged seven and 13. This second time around, Chloe is now nearly 10 and in grade four and Jess is in grade 10, having just turned 16.

Given the different ages of their girls, their education is approached a little different. As a staple, both girls have Excel education workbooks for Maths and English and they make use of educational apps. For Jess, the family recently discovered a website called Education Perfect that works well for them for home schooling. Lisa explains that you select the year level of your child, choose topics, and then select the lessons that are listed for that particular subject. Jess has a certain period of time to answer the questions and all the results get sent back to Lisa. Jess loves how its set up and loves that she can access it on her laptop.

Learning on the road

Home schooling also happens on the road by the likes of day trips to museums and hikes to interesting places. Lisa and Shannon said that Google helps a lot with history and geography for the kids to learn, as they get the kids to research the towns that they’re going into and from there, create their own lessons. “You have more control over what you are teaching your children,” Lisa says, adding that it’s “more specific to where you are and we find that they learn and retain the information a lot better because visually, they can see what they’re learning.”

Both parents can see how the kids have thrived on the road, noting the life lessons they are learning such as how to talk with strangers, how to deal with adversity, how to argue fairly in a family environment, how to manage money, how to go to the grocery story, how to read a nutritional label and more.

Camp Winnie encourages Aussie families to not let fear hold them back and just give it a crack. If you’d like to follow Camp Winnie’s travels around Australia, check out their YouTube channel here.