field trip

Field Trip Fun at the Farm

June 4, 2019 by Guest Writer

Need an idea for a fun, educational field trip not far from home? Visit a local farm! It’s a great way to connect with people in your community and learn about livestock and crops with other homeschooling families. With a little effort, you should be able to find some nearby farms that will afford your children a valuable learning experience.

Starting a Farm Field Trip

First, decide what type of farm you want to visit. Are you more interested in learning about crops or animals? A good option is a mixed farm, which has both. There are subsistence farms, which are just for the farmer and his family. Then there are commercial farms, which grow crops and breed animals to sell to the public. You could also choose to tour a dairy, pig, or poultry farm.

Planning Your Farm Field Trip

The next step is finding a farm, which is now a lot easier to do thanks to the internet! Try to use as many specific search words as you can; for example, “local dairy farms near me.” In just a few minutes you will be able to find farms along with their hours, locations, and prices. Many websites also include directions and reviews.

Another great way to find a farm is to ask people who know the area well and can recommend a good one to visit. They can tell you the best way to get in touch with a farm, whether it’s via phone, Facebook, or a website.

Once you have found the ideal farm destination, contact the owners and arrange a tour. This is usually done by calling them on the phone or sending them a message through Facebook or email. Some farms require a minimum number of guests in order to book a tour, so you may want to invite some other homeschooling families to join you. Besides, it’s more fun to share an experience with friends!

Determining Details

To ensure a smoother field trip, you may want to discuss a few things with your group. First, consider traveling arrangements. Are you all going to drive together or just meet there? Second, think about time frames. How long would families like to stay? Depending on the type of farm, expect your visit to last between one and two hours. Third, don’t forget about post-trip plans. Does everyone want to go home or do something else, such as go to a park? On our last visit, one of the homeschooling moms invited the group to her house for lunch and playtime afterward.

Following Up

The ride home is a wonderful opportunity to ask your children what they learned at the farm. Here are just a few questions my daughters and I discussed after our last farm trip:

What was your favorite thing about the farm?
What is something new you discovered on the tour?
What did you learn about God on our trip?

Your Turn

Find a nearby farm, round up your family and friends, and enjoy a unique learning adventure!

• • • • •

Jennifer is a pastor’s wife and mom of two young girls and loves homeschooling them. During her own twelve years of being homeschooled, Jennifer developed a passion for reading and writing. She earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and relishes writing during her free time.

10 Exciting Summer Activities for Homeschool Families

June 29, 2017 by Meredith

All right, admit it. Not all summer vacations are created equal.

Perhaps you remember figuring this out as a child when the neighbor kid returned from a mega theme park. After telling lots of cool stories, he asked where you were going on vacation that year. And somehow the idea of a weekend camping trip lost a little of its luster when compared to the excitement of the fast rides and thrills of a theme park.

The hard part for a child to learn is that it doesn’t matter so much where you have an adventure as much as who you have the adventure with! Some of the best childhood memories can spring from times when family members have little but each other. All it takes is a bit of imagination, resourcefulness, and creativity.

If your family—like most—just can’t seem to coordinate time and finances long enough to pull off a flashy vacation, don’t give up! For the family determined to have a good time together and make fun memories, there’s no need to even leave town.

Try these fun ideas for an unforgettable summer:

Go on a photo scavenger hunt with the whole family. Make a list of cool and wacky items to find around town—a statue of a lion, an ice cream shop, a blue kite, and such—and take fun family pictures with each item. To provide more of a challenge, set yourselves a time limit or divide the family into two teams. Maybe your town has something like Greenville’s Mice on Main^©.
Instead of going to the city pool or recreation center, find out whether there are any natural or manmade lakes or reservoirs in your area and if they’re open to the public. See whether you can find any information on how they were made, and then turn that into a summer field trip—with a picnic and an afternoon of swimming to finish up. If there are several, try to visit each lake or reservoir over summer break, and have the family rate them as to which ones were the best.
If you have very little ones, a summer camping trip may seem like too much of a hassle. But camping out in the backyard is certainly doable! Set up a tent (borrow one from a friend if you need to) and roll out sleeping bags for the whole family. Then, stoke the fire for dinner and some storytelling! (Depending on local ordinances, you may need to use a deck fire pit instead of building a fire directly on the ground.) A dinner of roasted hotdogs and toasted marshmallows will fill tummies nicely, and campfire songs and exciting stories told around the fire will make for a wonderful and memorable evening.
Have each of your children set a goal for the summer break. It can be any kind of a goal—frivolous (“I’m going to make my brother laugh every day”), practical (“Learn to ride a bicycle”), or slightly outlandish (“I’m going to touch my nose with my tongue”)—just so long as it’s the goal that child wants to pursue. Then have them chart their progress—they might have to get creative in how they measure it—as the weeks go by so that they can see how far they’ve come over the summer.
Join a summer reading program, but don’t just do it just for the children. Get everyone involved and track how many pages the entire family reads over the course of the summer. The program prizes will provide children with motivation to read, but you can spice it up even more by throwing in your own incentives for siblings who help each other reach their goals by reading out loud. Find some great books to read in these posts.
Invite friends over for a halfway Christmas party—play Christmas music, drink frozen hot chocolate (you can find great recipes online), do a white elephant gift exchange, go caroling in your neighborhood, and have a contest to see who can perform the best wacky summer skit version of Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol.
Plan a family theme day. As a family, decide on a theme—pirates or a favorite children’s story, like Secret Garden or Alice in Wonderland—and a specific day to celebrate it. Then brainstorm about decorations, food (there are lots of themed party recipes online), activities, costumes, and props—even what accents you’ll use. Make sure everyone is involved in the preparation and can contribute to the adventure.
Hold game tournaments. Incorporate board games, electronic games, and physical games to challenge the skills of family members in different arenas. You may even want to purchase a brand new board game that appeals to the whole family. Learn how to play it and then include it in your tournament matches.
Choose a skill that interests the whole family—maybe rock-climbing—and take lessons together throughout the summer. Not only will you be equipping your children with another skill but you will also be doing it in a way that provides quality family time.
Pile into the family car and try to get lost in your city! If you’ve lived there a long time, it might be a little difficult, but there are countless roads that will surprise you with the interesting things they hide. Stop at places that look interesting. Also, this is a great opportunity to help your children learn how to follow a map. Let one child be the navigator and trace your route on the map. Then have him practice giving directions accordingly. Alternatively, each child can chart a route on an individual map before leaving home and then take turns following the route as navigator.

The potential for summer fun is practically limitless. Learning can happen in the most surprising places and at unexpected times. And wonderful memories can be created without ever leaving town. All you need is a good imagination, a spirit of adventure, and some dedicated family time. So set the cell phones aside, turn off the TV, log off the computer/tablet, and go have some summer fun your family will never forget!

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5 Field Trip Tips for Fun and Learning

September 15, 2016 by Megan

Ask any child what he or she remembers most about the school year, and the answer will probably not include desks, worktext pages, or textbooks. I know my own memories as a homeschooled child don’t involve a lot of those things. Instead, I remember the extraordinary days—the day we took off school in the middle of an Illinois winter to go ice skating after watching the 1998 Winter Olympics^™, the day we spent at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and the day we spent at a wildlife reserve learning about animals native to the Midwest prairie lands. In other words, I remember the field trips.

Field trips are an important part of any homeschooling experience. Children of any age can benefit from the opportunity to see and experience new things. But before you start filling up your homeschool calendar with field trips, consider these tips

1. Choose a destination that fits the maturity level of your children.

For young children, consider visiting places where they can see something happen (like candy-making) or touch something (like a fire truck or a baby lamb)—someplace they don’t have to be particularly still or quiet. Although older children might greatly benefit from a trip to a history or art museum, young children would likely find such an outing tedious.

Also, be aware that many planetariums, museums, and botanical gardens may confront your child with nonbiblical worldviews such as evolution, materialism, or liberalism. Before you go, be prepared to help your children think biblically about these issues, but remind them to be gracious and polite to the staff and other visitors who hold these views.

2. Remember that field trips are supposed to be fun.

Don’t stress your children out by threatening to give them a test after a field trip experience or loading them down with pages of questions to answer. Instead, consider making a field trip journal or simply ask your children basic questions such as “What was your favorite thing about the trip?” or “What is one thing that you learned today?”

3. Avail yourself of local and inexpensive options.

Field trips don’t have to be expensive or time consuming. When my family moved to central Illinois in the mid-1990s, we were surrounded by farmland and were hours away from big tourist attractions. Therefore, most of our field trips were local—and often free. We toured the local library, a local fast-food restaurant, and the railroad yard. We identified trees in a local arboretum and went on nature walks. Call around to local businesses to find out which ones offer tours. To keep costs low, consider coordinating a field trip day with another homeschooling family in order to get group rates.

4. If possible, use field trips to reinforce the content your child has already studied.

Hands-on experiences will help your child retain knowledge and may even provide the “spark” he or she needs to study something further. My husband often relates how his love for history grew out of visiting many American history sites during his high school years. My now second-grader benefited greatly from visiting Jamestown Settlement (the living history site, not the actual site) after studying Jamestown in the 3rd edition of Heritage Studies 1. She was fascinated with early Native American life for weeks afterwards.

5. Be over-prepared.

Spontaneous field trips may sound fun, and sometimes they do work. However, planning ahead will save you and your children from potential disappointment. I’ll never forget the day my mother and I planned to take my children to a petting zoo for the afternoon. We packed a picnic lunch and traveled almost forty-five minutes only to find out that our destination was closed for the day.

So do your homework. Know exactly where you’re going and whether you need to make reservations. Call to confirm the trip a couple of days in advance. You might want to even make a Plan B in case it rains.

Now what? Perhaps the hardest part of all: loading the kids up in the car and hitting the road. I know how hard it is to go anywhere when you’re a homeschool mom, but it will be worth it—I promise! Enjoy seeing the spark of excitement in your child’s eyes. Treasure the flood of words that will come as they recount the wonders of new discoveries. Savor the time away from the textbooks and assignments. Make some memories. But be prepared to answer the inevitable question: “When will we have another field trip?”

The Olympics is a trademark of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Our Homeschool Field Trip Journal

August 11, 2016 by Ben

This summer our family had the opportunity to visit Jamestown Settlement. It isn’t on the original site of the first permanent English settlement in North America, but it is nearby on the James River. It’s a terrific place to teach children about history. All over the living history museum, docents encourage the children to touch everything. There are replica ships, a life-sized fort, even a Powhatan village. The site also has hands-on activities, so my daughters got to help remove fur from a deerskin with oyster shells and try on armor.

My wife and I had visited Jamestown Settlement before, so we knew the children would have fun and get an introduction to colonial life. But we wanted our four-year-old and six-year-old to view this as a learning opportunity and not an amusement park with a historical theme. But on the other hand, we didn’t want to remove the joy of learning that comes from an opportunity like this. So we developed a field trip journal. Using learning strategies that we gleaned from the BJU Press reading curriculum, we planned “pre-reading” and “post-reading” questions to improve our children’s learning comprehension.

Before the Field Trip

Just as we ask pre-reading questions to activate prior learning before reading a story, we asked our children to answer questions about what they knew before we arrived at Jamestown Settlement. Our six-year-old has finished first grade, so she wrote short sentences to answer questions. But both she and our four-year-old used crayons to draw pictures to express their thoughts. As they drew pictures of Native American tepees and horses, they were thinking through what they already knew about early American life. Their pictures were wrong since they drew cone-shaped tents. But that was good. They were setting themselves up to have their misconceptions corrected on the field trip.

We also asked them what they were looking forward to seeing the most at Jamestown. This created a sense of excitement and helped them look forward to the new things they would be learning.

After the Field Trip

Leaving the settlement, we sat at a picnic table to eat sandwiches, chips, and grapes. After lunch we pulled out their journals and asked them some more questions. We guided them to think through what they had learned and to draw pictures of the Powhatan huts, so they could see the difference between what they thought they knew before the field trip and what they knew afterwards. We also asked them to draw what they most enjoyed seeing. These questions cemented the learning for our children and helped turn a fun trip into long-term memory. The journals also became souvenirs that were far more valuable than the ceramic mugs at the gift shop.

Taking the Learning Outdoors

October 20, 2015 by Guest Writer

One of my favorite things about being homeschooled was taking a field trip on a whim, whenever the weather was especially beautiful. My brother and sister and I loved going on picnics, taking hikes, or visiting a blueberry patch during the late summer and fall. If a crisp, clear autumn day arrives, bringing with it incredibly blue skies and fresh breezes, call a field trip day and take the education outdoors. Check out these fun, fall-friendly excursions that are also learning opportunities for you and your kids.

Farm or Orchard

If you live in the United States, you probably have an orchard or a farm within driving distance of your home. Autumn weather is never more delightful than when you and your kids are out among the trees, picking apples with your own hands, or scouring a pumpkin patch for the perfect pumpkin pie. Often, farms and orchards have a few animals that the kids can feed, a hayride or tractor ride, or other enjoyable activities.

While you’re having fun, you can add an educational emphasis with a discussion of seeds, farming methods, and growth cycles. Your kids may have some questions to ask the farm or orchard personnel, so encourage them to speak up and take an active role in their own learning experience.

Zoo

With the cooler weather beginning, it’s a great time to visit the zoo. Instead of sticking to the shade and staying still as they did during summer’s heat, the animals are more likely to be active, so your kids will find the excursion more fascinating. Remember to bring along water, snacks, and a camera.

If you take time to read the posted information about each animal, the kids learn even more than they would through simple observation. Once you get home, you can look up more interesting facts about the animals that your family encounters.

Nature Preserve or Park

Fall weather gives you the perfect opportunity to take your kids on a nature walk or a hike. If your children are small, try a short walk through a patch of forest. For older kids or teens, a longer hike through a local nature preserve or state park is a treat.

A small bag or backpack for each child will allow them to collect treasures such as colorful leaves, unique rocks, or other found objects. You could bring along notebooks to sketch or write down the interesting things that you see during the hike. Why not give an older child a camera to snap photos of animals, plant life, and interesting rock formations?

If you plan a lengthy autumn expedition to the farm, the zoo, or the park, remember to layer clothing. Jackets are essential during the chilly early morning. Later, when the sun and the exercise warm everyone up, you’ll need an empty tote bag to stuff the jackets in so that you can carry them easily. Whether you’re talking about tree life cycles, crop rotation, or animal habitats, you can blend fresh air and a good education with fall field trips.