Excursions and Field Trips

The Class Teacher organises and facilitates excursions as part of the curriculum.

These journeys help integrate the themes of the Main Lesson and lead the children towards rapid social development. During excursions, groups of children interact in real-life situations in a caring and sharing manner.
Excursions provide the opportunity to overcome insecurity and bring about a greater level of maturity in relationships with other students and the Class Teacher.

Excursions are also educationally productive as they provide experience in fieldwork and generate creative work in the form of artwork, journal writing, commercial arithmetic and provide a stimulant for future drama productions.

Class Camps

Class camps form an integral part of the curriculum.

In Class One to Three, camps are primarily a time of social interaction on a 24-hour/day basis where the children learn to live with and care for each other, with an emphasis on observing the natural world from which their lessons are drawn.

By Class Four, the children are studying exploration and local geography in their Main Lessons and this is a time of focusing on longer bush walks and outings in their immediate vicinity.

From Class Five onwards, these excursions can extend further afield and link in with geography, botany, farming and industry lessons.

Each camp will have a different focus, depending on the age and maturity of the students, including physical challenges, opportunities to develop self-confidence and self-reliance, group awareness and responsibility and self-knowledge.
Some camps make possible a wider range of sporting activities such as canoeing, skiing, scuba diving and hiking.

Bush Walks

Teachers take their classes out on regular bush walks from Kindergarten through to Class Six. Bush walks play an integral part in education at the Dandenong Ranges Steiner School as they help to foster a reverence for nature and assist in building a sense of responsibility within our environment. Actively learning in nature is an important component of the overall curriculum. Given the location of our school, the classes have many beautiful bush walks to choose from right in our own backyard.