Field Trips!

I believe that taking field trips with your kids is so important! It not only gets your out of the house, away from the normal daily activities, but it helps them to understand their world. In the past couple of years since my children have been old enough to remember things, we have gone to Savannah, GA, WA D.C., camping in the mountains of NC, the zoo, the aquarium and science center, the fire department and police station, and recently to VA to visit Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown Settlement, and First Landing Beach!

In Colonial Williamsburg, my children got to see how people lived before we had the conveniences we have now! One of the things we saw was this tavern where the Continental Congress met to start talking about the beginning of the Declaration of Independence! What a neat place to sit in! This will be the start of another great history lesson and conversation :)

We also got to see a replica of the Susan Constant that brought the settlers to the New World in 1607! Seeing something like this in person and hearing explanations of each part works so much better than reading about it in a book! Before this, we passed through a replica of a Native American village!

I love to expose them to different places, cultures, and ways of life (present and past). Upcoming trips include Hawaii and Australia! Not only are they fun vacations but also full of history, exploration, discovery, understanding, and knowledge. Field trips don't even have to be far and a lot of times can be free! Anywhere you take your kids can be a part of their education. That's one big benefit to homeschooling! For this recent VA field trip, the boys each got their own disposable camera to take pictures of whatever they want to remember and document from their trip. They loved this! In the next couple of weeks they will work on a project to display what they saw and learned.

You can do the same with a camping trip in the mountains or in your woods! Find different leaves and research the trees they came from, find little creatures and make a Venn diagram to compare and contrast them, write journal entries as if you were a pioneer, etc. You just have to use your imagination :) The beach would be the same! Learning about the tides and what sand is made of, finding animals on the beach and studying them! We count these trips as homeschool days for our year, too! Go ahead and plan some field trips for the year!

*May 14, 2019