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Kathryn
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| Posted: Sept 14 2011 at 11:04pm | IP Logged
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I  field trips!!!  I want to know what you think of them. Ok, if you realllllly hate them, may be I don't want to know that. 
Do you see the value in field trips?
Do you incorporate them into schooling and if so, how often?
Do you reserve them for week-end time as a whole family with dad or do you take time during the school week?
Do you try to "add-on" extra learning or reinforce learning from the trip with extra (busy) work before, during or after? For some it could be busy work but if I'm really wanting it to be for learning, I think my DS has to have this extra reinforcement or the retention is minimal.
How do you go about making it a learning experience?
I don't want to be so structured and so inflexible but I've found (esp. my son and now his 4 yr old sister) tend to float (dare I say run sometimes!) from one thing to another like it's a free for all. I know they're excited but I want to make sure there is some educational value and I'm not sure how to go about doing that. For example, we had a pass to the local musuem and went several times over the past year. One of their exhibits is called Energy Blast and there is loads of hands-on activities. However, as the kiddos push a bunch of buttons, then "look" at something for less than 60 seconds before bolting to the next activity hardly seems worthwhile (to me). ? May be they're over-stimulated. ? When I had them slow down and take a look at what the activities were about, my DS11 and DD4 actually DID slow down and became more immersed in one activity and we talked about it before they moved on. This happens all the while DD12 sits or walks around with her notebook writing and drawing and looking and still exploring but "getting it".
So, what are your thoughts about field trips and their place in learning?
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Kathryn in TX
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mom2mpr
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I LOVE field trips. We have done so few of them and I am making them a priority this year as my youngest(8 yo) should get to enjoy them like big brother did when he was younger. I am hoping to do one per month this year and probably during the school week.
Re: kids behavior: Some kids flit, others study, others just stand in the room--all depends on age/development(younger kids will probably flit  ) and personality and learning style. I think just providing the opportunity is enough. That's the joy of ft's. I think if you can have some structure first, a talk or class or demonstration, then allow freedom to explore its a great learning experience. Talking about it after-what was your favorite part, what did you think of......., do you think the...., etc. on the way home reinforces. My kids brought learning into their play so I knew it was good.
I learned this during a field trip to an art museum when ds was "flitting" age . A docent took the kids around the museum, parked them in front of a few exhibits, pulled out her stool, sat down and talked about it with the kids for a little bit. Then we went exploring on our own and I have never had such a cool visit to a museum! AND she told this cool Indian story about a sculpture and we had an Indian man over from dh's work who brought THAT sculpture as a gift AND my kid went into the whole story and boy, this guy was impressed with homeschooling. It was TOO cool.
Now that my kids are older I might bring one on a ft and leave one home-depends on the place--i.e. a certain movie ds wants to see that's not appropriate for dd--daddy can stay home with dd and bake cookies.
I attribute our decrease in ft's to preparing ds for high school. So, if your kiddos are little, go, play and enjoy!!
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Anne, married to dh 16 years!, ds,(97), Little One (02), and dd (02).
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MaryM
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Oh, yes love field trips. Didn't have time to answer the specifics, but I'll be back later.
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Mary M. in Denver
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JodieLyn
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Well I take my whole crew to some museums. We have more natural history style museums with outdoor exhibits and paths and a play area outside as well as exhibits inside. When you have a guide for an area they are often in period costume and talk about it like you're there.
Ok so what do I do.
1)buy the family pass.. that gives us a year to explore the museum, no pressure to see it all that day.
2) figure out where we can go for the kids to play/run/let off steam.
3) first visit is usually a fly by.. we try and at least see what all is in the museum rather than go to talks or spend a lot of time on exhibits.
4) subsequent trips we pick and choose. So that we might only see a portion of the museum at this time but those portions we take time and teach the kids to take the time and not just run to the next. It works pretty well if we do something active either at the museum or right before going there.. then do an exhibit.. then do something more active, even if it's just walk around and find the bathrooms and drinking fountain.. just make it a brisk walking around rather than a browsing. Then pick another exhibit to explore or a talk to attend and that may be all. Revisit favorites of the kids (we always go and visit the otter for instance.)
This lets the kids be both active and attentive.. sometimes letting them "flit" as Anne mentioned is appropriate. Some exhibits lend themselves to this.. and I find my kids flit and come back to where I am and then flit again.. giving me the opportunity to mention interesting things.. which as the kids get older then they are slowing down enough to at least figure out some basic information before going to the next.
Some of it is just setting parameters for the kids and then keeping them within it.. it always helps to go over the rules before you go in the door.
I have successfully taken all of my kids by myself to a familiar museum.. people tend to be easily amazed by kids that know how (and are expected) to behave nicely.
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JodieLyn
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oh sorry got interupted.
we tend to reinforce what they've seen in the car (most things are long trips). We ask them what they remember and get them to talk about it.. or ask questions like who can remember the animal that lives high in the mountains where it's rocky? Asking this way often helps even little ones answer and it becomes more of a game than anything, it's all very light.
But what it does is it gets them thinking about what we've just seen so that it cements the information before it's lost. They don't even have to answer.. just by asking the questions they'll be going over what they've seen and learned in their heads trying to find the answer. And when it becomes a habit the kids also will remember more the next time in anticipation of the "fun game" in the car. But i think it's catching them right afterward, not waiting until the next day, or until we get home or something.
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All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
-Sir Walter Scott
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MommyMahung
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We LOVE field trips!  We go during the week when the crowds will be less. Sometimes Dad comes with us. The kids get to look at the "main" attractions or exhibits on-line and decided what is interesting to them. Then we read about it together. At the place, the kids read the map and guide us to the destination(s) of choice. They are responsible for reading the signs and tracking different things of importance. I do my best to incorporate as many subjects as possible, such as reading, math, religion, science and anything else that is appropriate.
We also re-cap the visit on our drive home and once we are home, they get to put the memory card of the camera into their Wii so they can "watch" themselves discovering, learning and most importantly playing! We only like the hands on museums at this point. My kids are 6, 4, and 2. The more hands on the better for them.
Just last week we went to the Chicago Botanical Gardens and to the zoo! They learned so much...now they want to make stuffed animals and grow more plants! They even made their bees and pretend to harvest from flowers as well as build honeycomb.
Sorry about the rambling, but we LOVE field trips!
Laura
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SallyT
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We love them, too. Ours tend to be kind of spontaneous -- we just have to get out of the house for a day, so we go to the free day at the science center, or to the natural-history museum, or up to the mountains, or to a Revolutionary-War battlefield, because we have those nearby . . .
Veeerrrrry occasionally I'll plan something that actually fits with what we're studying, but generally speaking, if I waited either for a topic to come up for which to plan a given outing, or an outing to come up at just the time when we're hitting a given topic, we'd never go anywhere. So I see field trips as operating in any the following ways:
1. Either the experience resonates with something we've read about in the past, bringing an old topic to the forefront for a day with renewed vividness, to be revisited and re-digested and explored from different angles,
or
2. The experience provides a helpful set of schemata (in, edu-speak, frameworks for understanding) for understanding something we'll read in the future. For example, in June we went to Boston, Lexington and Concord, and spend a lot of time over the colonial and Revolutionary sites. Now we're reading Johnny Tremain for bedtime reading, and there are sights, sounds, and other elements of *context* which the kids can access in their memories, which add to their experience of the story (of course we could just as easily have done it the other way -- gone to Boston and been like, "Oh! Here's where Johnny was!" That would have been the kind of experience I meant by #1).
3. The experience sparks a whole new interest that neither the child/ren in question nor I had anticipated.
And within appropriate parameters, I really let my children lead. Obviously there are rules, and since there's a group of us, one person can't just run away to pursue whatever catches his eye. Especially when my kids were younger, I loved exhibits in closed rooms (our local science museum's "traveling exhibit" room has a door, so nobody can wander out), because I could let the kids spread out in the exhibit and do whatever hands-on things attracted them without trying to shepherd everyone from one thing to another.
Now I do let my teenager go off on his own with an agreement to meet us at a predetermined time and place, and my 7- and 9-year-olds lead me around. We have to do some give-and-take, because I can't split myself in two to follow each child's whims, but my general rule for myself is that I don't go in with preconceived notions about what we're going to do, see, and learn. Obviously, if it's a science museum, we'll come away having experience some scientific concepts; if we're at a historical re-enactment, we'll have soaked up some history. But I try to let the experience be a discovery thing for them, and not one more version of "Mom wants us to think about X." (which is sounding good to me right about now, since we've had kind of a difficult morning of Mom wanting people to think about X without turning it all into a fight . . . *sigh*. We need a field trip.)
Sally
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SallyT
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Oh, and I should add: I love our local museums and try to maintain memberships so we can go for an hour, say, and not worry about seeing everything. If we stay in just one part of the museum and float around there, we absorb more than if we were trying to see the whole thing. So we visit often, but in small "bites." This was especially important when the youngers were really young and wanted to do that "run from one end to the other" thing without really stopping to explore anything in depth.
Sally
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Kathryn
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Lots of great ideas that help me not be so *mom* lead in my planning. Remember that over-planning thread of mine? I think I do a lot of the talk about before, talk about after etc. but my mind still gets in the school mode of "let me see on paper what you know". This helps reinforce that we're not just blowing off "school" work to play but that there is value in these times.
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Kathryn in TX
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kingvozzo
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| Posted: Sept 24 2011 at 5:20pm | IP Logged
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We love field trips here, too!
Great advice from all the ladies, especially buying a membership if you can, to relieve the pressure of having to "see it all!"
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Noreen
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MicheleB
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We like field trips!  We like to visit the aquarium as well as homeschool-priced ballets and plays. I have noticed over the years, that while it is fun and more convenient to go with friends, the children seem to get more out of the trip if we go alone. I feel guilty for admitting that.  Maybe I mean they get more of what I want them to get. I do love going with a friend or two and having another mom to talk to and trade off taking kids to the bathroom, but the kids are more focused on the social aspect than the content of the trip. We went to the aquarium a couple of weeks ago with a friend. We had a great time, but there was a lot of running from exhibit to exhibit and calling to "come see this," while a child was looking at something else. Maybe I expect too much from my children or from the field trips. I prefer to spend a day at the playground with a friend and save field trips (aquarium, history or nature museum) for family events when possible.
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MicheleB
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Forgot to add that we do try and read up on some topics before a trip. We are planning to go to a performance of the Nutcracker, and I think we will just be finishing up a 6 week Degas/Tchaikovsky study that I adjusted our schedule for. During the week before the aquarium trip, I read the girls passages from the Apologia Swimming Creatures book while they ate breakfast. When we go to a museum, I bring colored pencils and paper for sketching. (and I bring extra art supplies to offer friends if they are with us )
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violingirl
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We love field trips too. :)
I try to plan a field trip every 3 or 4 weeks as best we can. I work about 30 hours a week Monday-Friday, so our field trips are either on Friday morning (since I start teaching students much later that day) or on the weekend as a family.
We get family memberships to a few places if possible each year and like Jodie said that really allows us to explore. They can "flit" for the first 2 or 3 visits, and then we can go and focus on one section at a time on subsequent visits.
My boys are really young, so I'm focused more on exposure on field trips rather than serious retention. Sometimes, however, I think they aren't really picking anything up on a field trip and several weeks later one of them will mention a detail I was POSITIVE they didn't notice on the trip.
We do read or talk a little bit ahead about what we will be seeing or doing, and afterwards I usually have them make a notebook page- they draw a picture about what they liked best on the field trip and either I or they write a little about what it was, even if it's as simple as "I went to the zoo and saw elephants." My boys both like to draw and they have really enjoyed putting their pages together in a section of their notebook to look back through. I think that has helped retention too, because as they go back through those simple pages they bring up other things that they saw on that particular trip.
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MaryM
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Kathryn wrote:
Do you see the value in field trips?
Do you incorporate them into schooling and if so, how often?
Do you reserve them for week-end time as a whole family with dad or do you take time during the school week?
Do you try to "add-on" extra learning or reinforce learning from the trip with extra (busy) work before, during or after?
How do you go about making it a learning experience?
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I do see value in field trips and we tend to do one a month at least - sometimes more.
Like Laura we try to go on field trips during the week, and in the afternoon when possible. If school groups are doing field trips they are in the morning and usually leave after lunch in order to get back to school so it's less crowded then. But we do things on weekends sometimes so Dad can go along or when the event is only on the weekend. And we travel A LOT - so our trips are always a big "field trip" and I check out in advance what we can take advantage along the way or near our destination that will be educational. Sometimes they fit a theme as well - like in 2009 when we tried to get a lot of Lincoln stops when we went back to Ohio. Filled that in with the other events and exhibits that were happening for his 200th birthday celebration that year.
We take advantage of current exhibits and events for field trips even if they don't fit in with our studies. If we do them and I think it would be beneficial to do more study we get material to either read as prep or follow up. For example if I lived in the east - especially the south where they are currently doing so much extra for the Civil war sesquicentennial then I would be all over those. I think when there are these special events or exhibits it is very important to take advantage of them.
Then we generally talk about what we saw. I'll try to bring things into conversation or when it comes up in our studies - asking questions, referring to something we saw, seeing if they see connections or can intuit back to the field trip.
Then if we are studying something and I'm aware of a local resource that would add to their experience and understanding we will seek it out and visit as many places as we can that fit the study. For example when we did geology, we have lots of local resources (museums, mines, gem & mineral show, gold panning demos) and took advantage of those. If you can build on the theme with a couple different hands-on field trips it helps the interest and retention.
I like all your thoughts on your approach, Sally.
Michele's points about going alone or with a group is well taken. I hadn't really thought about it but I would agree, especially if it is a bigger group. If it is a self-paced, see what you want exhibit and they have friends with them, they can get very distracted. The exception I would say is if it is a directed field trip with a tour guide. The kids still tend to do well focusing and we usually need the group to be able to do those tours - won't do them for individual families.
I'm hoping to post a list of the field trips we've done in the past couple of years to give an idea. I have that on another computer.
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Mary M. in Denver
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MamaFence
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I want to come back to this...
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Gina, mother to 4
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Kathryn
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| Posted: Sept 26 2011 at 9:58pm | IP Logged
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Well, I've got a load of trips coming up:
D/FW International Airport tour on Weds and I planned nothing extra (with local HS group)
Apple Orchard on Friday with a few extra activities (with local HS group)
Civil War Museum is next Weds. which is where my major extra activities are (with their HS co-op class)
Lone Star History Day (for homeschoolers only and geared toward science in history this year) is the following Friday of which I have nothing extra planned
(just us)
I do agree that there might be more overall value in going it alone but the social aspect is missing (for us all). I guess I feel so lucky to live in an area with so many opportunities. Sometimes it's a bit overwhelming as obviously I don't want to take away from our "regular" schooling but for my son esp. he so needs to be out and about and exploring and this is really the only way to do that. I just have to make sure it does have some lasting importance. 
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Kathryn in TX
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4Real Forums : Living Learning
Topic: How do you use field trips w/ schooling?
