How do field trips work?

While we don’t have a school bus or need to plan field trips a year in advance, we can nimbly choose our field trips based on interest and availability of families. We recently attended an engineering camp at MIT together as a microschool and it was a lot of fun to experience something new for our students nearby at a world-class university.

When the school year first started The Wild Robot movie was at our local drive-in movie theatre. Our students had all read the book and so it was fun to surprise them with an outing like this! A quick flurry of text messages later we had a plan to meet up at the theatre and enjoy an evening with lots of popcorn, candy and bonding.

Field trips serve a lot of different purposes for students and teachers, here are some thoughts I have in mind when planning something for the group: 

1. Interest

   1. Will they be excited to see this/attend this museum/experience this? 

      
      

2. Location and Cost

   1. Is it something that will be cost prohibitive or is the travel too difficult to attend? 

3. Bonding

   1. Will they have fun together as a group?

   2. Will the group dynamics support a successful trip?

      
      

4. Educational Value

   1. It’s hard not to find educational value in field trips.

   2. They’re experiencing and navigating in the real world.

   3. They’re encountering new situations and people.

   4. They’re taking in new information, processing it and engaging in a shared experience with their classmates. 

      
      

5. Community Connection

   1. Spending time communicating with members of our local community is beneficial for both our students and the community member they are chatting with. I love seeing how engaged a student is talking about what they're learning!

   2. My own children have been asked, "Why aren't you in school?" while on a field trip to a history museum by other adults. So, the learning opportunities for other adults to see children learning outside of the classroom are vital as well.

      
      

6. Promoting Life-long learning

   1. The group learning experience is something that they will take with them as life-long learning adults. 

   2. What special exhibits do their local museums have? What theatrical productions are their local universities and regional theatres doing? 

   3. My hope is that as adults they will seek out new experiences for themselves, and how can they learn this without modeling this behavior? Maybe as young adults they will get a group of peers together to experience something new. They’ll plan a camping trip or rent a kayak on a weekend to do something different and experience the world in a different way.  

When asked, our students say:

"The point of field trips is to experience new surroundings and learn new things. My favorite thing about field trips is spending time with my classmates. In the future I'd like to visit the aquarium or an escape room!" -K., 12

"I like walking to the place and talking to people. I have fun and seeing what everyone else is doing. In the future I would like to go to the aquarium!" -L., 13

I believe that field trips are essential to the homeschool (and traditional school) experience and allow for real-world experiences of the things they are reading about in their books. A textbook chapter about Ancient Egypt comes to life when visiting an exhibition at a local museum. A documentary about coastal ecosystems becomes more real when we can actually visit the coast and see the animals living there for ourselves. 

I’m grateful for the flexibility and the dedication of my parents who are willing to help make these special field trips possible for our students! And while we can’t visit every since place that we’re interested in, if you’re someone who would like to lead an enrichment, let me know! We can bring the field trip to Kalexedy.