Kids walk into shops with no shoes on here, and I've actually seen plenty of adults do that too. That was one of the first things that gave me some culture shock when I moved to New Zealand from the US five years ago.
Like most families, we started with kindy, then school, for our oldest daughter right when she turned 5. But it wasn't the best fit from the start and so I started to research homeschooling, we made the choice to pull her out and try that instead.
We had never done anything like this before, and I didn't know anybody else who was homeschooling. But I wanted to give it a try, and I knew I needed some community to do it.
How the nature group actually started
I went looking for "homeschool co-ops" or groups that I could join, I lurked in local Facebook groups reading all the posts and comments, seeing who was asking what, trying to find anyone we could be friends with. Around the same time, I found a friend on Instagram who, surprisingly, wanted to meet up and go for a hike. That was Bailey, American mum in NZ just like me. She and I became friends doing hikes and adventures with our little kids.
I kept looking, though, to grow our homeschool community further. That's when I saw Catherine post in a Facebook group that she had girls the same age as my older two. We connected there, and after a little while of chatting, I discovered she'd actually be keen to start a nature group. So the two of us started one, meeting once a week. Bailey was the first person who joined us. Not long after, Fliss started coming along too, and that became our core group.
What that group gave our kids
We called it Wildlings back then, and the whole point was giving our kids a real sense of connection, something they were building together, not just casual meetups. We went every week so our kids could build that foundational friendship. From there it just kept going, overnight hikes in the bush, camping, eventually traveling internationally together.
When Bailey left New Zealand for Ireland, we knew we needed to expand. That's when Wildlings became Worldlings, so we could stay connected across the world ourselves, and share some of our love of travel with other families too. Between the four of us, we've lived in several different countries, and we wanted our kids to grow up genuinely curious, about the world, about new cultures, new people, new ways of doing things.
Where the packs themselves came from
The packs grew from a conversation about how we could actually bring a culture alive for our own kids, not just teach them facts about it. One of the ideas we kept coming back to was connection, we wanted our kids to feel connected to a kid on the other side of the world, and for a kid somewhere else to feel a real connection to New Zealand too.
That's why we focused on kid culture instead of adult culture, what's actually in a kid's lunchbox, what they play at school, the animals they'd actually care about rather than just the ones in a textbook. That's still the whole approach behind every pack we make.
Why New Zealand came first
When we started building the Country Packs, New Zealand was the obvious place to start, we all live here, and we love it here. We wanted to share that same barefoot culture shock from day one, alongside the Māori side of life here too. So New Zealand came first, and we're genuinely excited to keep expanding from here.
If you want a piece of that day
The New Zealand Country Pack is what came out of all of it, poi, backyard games, a barefoot kind of day, built the way we actually lived it first.
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