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Family Field Trips
Educational Adventures
By Teri Brown
Learning with field trips is fun, and fun inspires a love of learning. Children who love to learn become lifelong learners. Through taking family day trips, children realize learning isn't always about books or memorization, but it's also about experiencing, firsthand, what our world has to offer. It is a joyous process that builds on itself in an ever widening circle, inviting even more exploration.
History is filled with real people doing real things. I care more about my children having a historical perspective than I do about them knowing dates and places. I want them to know that children have always made mud pies; they just wore different clothes while doing it. Before they can care about the important events in history, children must first realize that these events involved real people. Historical day trips to interactive museums or reenactments do more to foster this perspective than any textbook could.
As humanity's abuses of the environment mount, it becomes even more important that our children have a working knowledge of the natural world. Ignorance has ruined fragile ecosystems and doomed animals to extinction; this in turn has affected our own health and well-being. By taking day trips to wildlife viewing areas, hatcheries and reserves, I am nurturing a relationship between my children and the natural world that will last a lifetime.
Most tweens love heading out into the grat outdoors, and if you can add a little excitement to the trip, all the better. For instance, some tweens might only be lukewarm about a hike along a river, but if you switched that to a rafting trip, it becomes a whole different story. It will amaze both you and your children how different things look from the river – your trip has a whole new perspective, and the excitement will help make it memorable for your child.