Camping Can Provide Some Great Outdoor Play And Learning Opportunities

This is a bit more of a personal post, but stick with me because I do list some of the great learning opportunities that you can experience when camping.

Pheweeee….what a busy weekend we had a few weeks ago. If you follow me on Facebook you would have seen my message that we were off camping. And as I’m writing this post you will gather that I survived (but only just finished all the washing!).

I must admit I am a bit of a princess and camping is not really my thing. Before we had Little Miss Two we lived up in the north west of Australia, specifically Port Hedland and Karratha. We camped a lot when we lived up there and I feel like I’ve done my stint camping. But now that we have our little girl, well apparently this is the type of thing you must do.

Firstly, we had to pack up all the stuff we would need, no small feat. You will see why when I show you a pic of our camp set up. My hubby definitely doesn’t do things in halves. We were thoroughly kitted out and ready for the 3 nights. Have a look at the fully loaded car below.

Car loaded up and ready to go

We were heading up to Greenhead. This is a small coastal town about 288km north of Perth, in Western Australia. There’s not much there, the caravan park which is where we stayed, a small general store, some apartment style accommodation with a restaurant and a café.

Little Miss Two did really well in the car and she fell asleep even before we hit the open road. She managed to sleep for about an hour and a half, which was about half the journey. When she woke I kept her occupied with food and singing.

Little Miss Two keeping herself occupied with Dad’s hat

We had stayed at this caravan park about 10 years ago, so I had a picture in my head of what it would be like. I must admit I was a little disappointed, as the place I remember was very lush and green with lots of tall trees. There must have been minimal rain over winter as it was very dry. But it was nice and quiet and we had no other campers near us. Check out our camp set up below.

Our camp set up

Camping can really provide some great unstructured outdoor play and learning opportunities for kids. Some of the learning that Little Miss Two was involved with included:

1. Helping to set up camp – using a hammer to bang in the pegs, putting the poles together for the tent and helping to pull out the tarp. Little Miss Two just loves being helpful :-).

2. Finding all the different animals that we don’t usually see in the city. We saw many different types of birds, lots of ants (not a favourite of Little Miss Two’s), bobtail lizards, bees and butterflies, sea snails, crabs and oysters.

3. Fishing – This was only successful for a few minutes as it was pretty quiet on the boat and we didn’t get many nibbles. Little Miss Two did get a little bored and needed entertaining.

4. Beach combing and kayaking – We had hours of fun at the beach swimming, looking for shells and other interesting bits, kayaking and playing on the boogie board. Have a little look at the photos below of some of the fun we had in the sun!

Watching Mum kayak

“Look at me, I can kayak”

Chillaxing with Dad

5. Sandcastle building – Now who doesn’t love building a sandcastle? Little Miss Two loves helping to build sandcastles and then to jump on them and squash them. Very good ‘squashing’ style below.

The best part of building….squashing

Aaahhhhh and finally falling fast asleep at the end of a very busy day

As much as I don’t really like camping (give me a 5 star resort any day) Little Miss Two had a ball. It was great watching Little Miss Two in the outdoor fun and seeing what she would discover next!

Do you go camping with your kids? What’s your favourite part of camping? If you haven’t taken the kids before….then why not give it a go!