Australia School is finished, well, the formal requirements anyway. It is easy for anyone to imagine that Lucia and Chelsea have flourished in their ‘Big Lap Year’ in ways that a set school curriculum could not tap into. The places, experiences, people and general day to day of spontaneous events, curious self generated learning, indulgent pleasures, getting along 24/7in a very confined space, cooking, cleaning,  and all that just happens is too impossible to articulate. The girls have never had an allocated ‘weekend’ or ‘school holiday’ so to speak. Lucia and Chelsea finally wisened to this, expressed the ‘unfairness’ of it and the deal to leave the last 6-weeks of the trip schoolwork free was struck.

For the past month and a half Lucia and Chelsea have put in extra big efforts to finish their formal schooling tasks and leave the last month home as ‘school holidays’. Both girls have done incredibly well to keep up with formal tasks all year in the midst of moving camp nearly every 3 days, sometimes every day. It is probably hard to imagine the challenge they have had in been Travelling Students.

 

Lucia and Chelsea have been willlingly and unwillingly persistent and effortful, with joy at times, other times with moaning, and sometimes even with strategic abandon!!  I have asked them to step out of beautiful environments and put their heads down and bottoms up for a couple of hours, redirecting to tasks that are in stark contrast to where they are at in those moments. Added to this, there is the challenge of environment like excessive heat, dry dusty winds, flies and more flies and no electricity for some cool relief. We’ve done car school, caravan school, library school, pub school, pool school, bunk school, night school…….the list goes on. It goes without saying, that where we’ve been able to make it more fun, motivating, and flexible we have. The one thing that has not worked in our favour is using e-technology resources as the WiFi has been generally poor and more often that not we are in remote camps where there’s not even phone coverage.

A big, big thanks to Ms Poulish and Mrs Parker for sending up resources, providing feedback and encouraging the girls to feel very connected to Westport while we’ve been gone.  Mrs Huddy, their school principal, has been very generous in playing the girls’ i-movie reports at school assemblies and sending them letters too. But most importantly, 10,000 gold stars to both Lucia and Chelsea for just getting the job done. We are really, really proud of you!