Adding Field Trips to Your Homeschool
In this article, you will find:
Where to go
Identifying Potential Field TripsThe field trips that you take are limited only by your imagination. Although it is impossible to list all the possible field trips there are, here are a few examples to get you thinking about the possibilities:
- Historical sites
- Zoos and aquariums
- Parks and nature sites
- Businesses and factories
- Theaters and symphonies
- Museums
- Government facilities
- Airports, bus stations, train stations, and other transportation sites
- Media outlets, such as television and radio stations, newspapers, and so on
One way is to review upcoming lesson plans and choose a field trip that ties directly to those plans. One of the easiest examples of this is history. As you review your history lesson plans, you can identify historical sites that directly tie to specific lessons. Or, you might be studying social studies and decide to take a field trip to the office of someone who is running for a political office.
The other way is to adapt lesson plans to a field trip that you want to take. For example, you might not plan to cover some historical event in upcoming lesson plans, but a good opportunity to visit an interesting historical site related to that event pops up. In such a case, you might create a "mini" lesson plan about the historical event that takes advantage of the field trip.
Although it is best if a field trip ties directly to your current lesson plans, don't let this become a hard and fast rule. Some field trip opportunities will pop up without you being able to link them directly to your current lesson plans. Sometimes, this kind of field trip turns out to be the best kind.
When it comes to participating in a field trip that you have identified, there are two basic options. You can participate in a field trip that someone else has planned or you can plan a field trip yourself.