World-wide Pen Pals and Contacts required
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
Starting ahead of time and taking time to plan well in advance in terms of building a good network of friend and contacts leading up to our travels - today we made a start at getting Jessica and AJ involved in the preparation and plans. We began by introducing them to the start of our website and explained what we had done so far. We explained the couchsurfing community project (www.couchsurfing.com) we joined a few days and how nice it would be if we could obtain pen pals for Jessica and AJ as well as ourselves also. Jessica is already aware from previous discussions but we re-discussed the route, preparation and intended date we plan to travel. AJ doesn’t really have an interest (still a bit on the young side and more interested in playing with his cars!) but it encouraged an interesting topic of conversation. The banter kicked off with Jessica asking how many people lived in the UK which led to small exercise where we googled some significant countries along our route and looked at population sizes e.g.
July 2007 stats
United Kingdom: 60.75 million
China: a huge 1.3 billion
Moldova: only 4.3 million
Australia: 20 million (two thirds less than the UK!)
Thailand: 61.5 million (comparable to UK)
India: 1.12 billion (comparable to China)
We looked at the big world map poster on our bedroom wall so the children could see size and scale of each country versus population within each place and discussed. We changed statistics into money (e.g. UK = 60pence and Australia = 20pence in terms of making easier to understand the population sizes).
As each day goes by, there is an increasing awareness of the need to think about and know how to make education snippets on the road short, memorable, interesting and enjoyable - and the importance of keeping education high on the agenda.
We discussed possible comments about ourselves that might help others become interested in becoming penpals with us. Here is what Jessica and AJ said about themselves:
Jessica ” I have brown hair and blue eyes and suffer from a little ‘bother of a brother’. I like riding my bike especially in forests and woods and parks. I am looking forward to seeing new countries and meeting and speaking to people with different languages”.
She added later that she knows what she wants to be when she grows up - “the world’s first real-life super hero”. Jessica is also interested in Astronomy and knows all the planets by heart and where to look for things in the night-time sky. We took her to Greenwich in January this year for her and she really loved the experience which was very educational for us as well. Would definately go back and recommend to others! We hope to keep her interest alive in this while we travel.
AJ ” I like going in the skateboard park. I like my bike, playing football high in the sky, pulling leaves off trees, playing with my toy aeroplanes (and real ones that fly up in the sky!). I like my toy cars, lego and my knights and tumbling off the sofa.”
AJ has a very cheeky grin which can melt hearts and one of his sole missions in life is make Jessica’s life fustrating at the best of times with his antics. We plan to bring a straight-jacket for him along the journey.
We hope we will be able to build and make some friendships from UK to Australia for all our benefits. If you are interested or can help, please contact us.
