
Field Trip Ideas
Field trips are something I’m passionate about, and that’s why I’m sharing all of my best field trip ideas today.
When I first began homeschooling 17 years ago, there were fewer resources for homeschoolers, so I just created what I had grown up — school at our kitchen table. But I wanted our homeschool to be better than what I had grown up with, only I couldn’t really define better. I thought and researched, and the only I idea I could come up with for “better” was more rigorous.
So I bought mountains of textbooks and curriculum, overjoyed at the thought that we’d all be speaking Latin and solving multivariable equations by Christmas!
I laugh about it now!
The one thing I did do right that year was join a field-trip group full of more experienced homeschoolers. 17 years ago is a little blurry for me, but I do remember attending their first meeting, where they were organizing field trips for the year, and thinking to myself, “We can’t take off school every Friday!”
I was probably wondering how it would affect our Latin syllabus.
During that first meeting the group leaders assigned out dates for field trips (each mom had to plan and execute two field trips during the year) and I received an assignment. And then I talked with a few other moms about their ideas, which sounded fantastic. How I could not join?
Why Field Trips Matter to Your Homeschool
That decision ended up drastically influencing my homeschool for the better — and not just because we attended field trips every Friday. That field trip group helped me to see, through experience, that my kids learned more from a fascinating, two-hour, Friday morning tour of a water treatment plant than from an entire Geological study of the water cycle.
It was our first foray into delight directed learning!
Children are born with boundless curiosity. They want to learn about and make sense of the world around them. You can only stop them by, well, forcing them to sit in a desk in a classroom.
When you take a child someplace interesting (I call interesting place question-pullers) you are opening a whole new world of rabbit trails for that child. To you, it might look like your child is hopping back and forth, criss-crossing a landscape in no particular order.
But your child is learning all about everything to do with that new place, digging deeper into the things that particularly interest him, just scratching the surface in others, and just generally creating an immense file in which to organize all of the things he is learning about this wide, wondrous world — all the things that help him to make sense of it.
My kiddos weren’t all that excited about their textbooks, but they would ask five million questions before, during and after each Friday field trip. Those questions always led to voluntary research and learning, followed by more questions, and more research and learning.
We once visited a beaver farm. While visiting, we learned that Beavers particularly enjoy wood from fruit trees. My kiddos wanted to run right home and chop limbs off our fruit trees to bring back for the cute beavers, so we were able to discuss proper pruning techniques and learn about how fruit trees grow and why we prune them, which led to a discussion about blossom pollination and bees and other pollinators.
When we closed the books after school M-Th, they stayed closed until the next lesson. But Friday field trips would lead to continuous, voluntary and joyous, nonstop learning. It was truly the kind of learning that can be described as passionate.
One of the best parts of homeschooling is seeing that “ah-ha moment” when our children truly understand the importance of what we are teaching them. It’s like the circuit is finally connected and the light goes on. That was happening as a result of our field trips, and not as a result of our day-to-day learning.
Luckily, I was able to see the difference in the two types of learning, and make necessary changes to our M-F homeschool. That’s not to say we gave up our Latin. I might still be a little obsessed with Latin declensions.
Nothing will make learning come alive for your kiddos like field trips. It’s one thing to learn about the history of the U.S. by reading about it, it’s another thing entirely to take a US History Road Trip and visit those historical sites in person.
While field trip opportunities will vary from place to place, every family has access to unique field trip opportunities. So use the list below to brainstorm as you are deciding what field trips to add your homeschool schedule.
How do you get started?
First, you need someplace interesting to visit.
25 Field Trip Ideas for Homeschoolers:
Here are some field trip ideas that will help inspire a love of learning in your homeschool.
1. Visit Historical Sites
As you learn history together, you’ll find historical sites (either local or not) to visit that pertain to the current curriculum you’re studying at home. We’ve visited battlefields and monuments all over the United States, but some of the very most interesting historical sites we’ve visited ( Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Hovenweep and Dun Angus ) are from ancient history rather than modern history — so don’t forget all the historical periods.
2. Attend A Reenactment
Bring history to life by attending a war reenactment or renaissance fair. My state, Utah, has a Golden Spike (the transcontinental railroad meeting) reenactment, a mountain man rendezvous and so much more. One year, we visited Boston April 19, which is the anniversary of the ‘shot heard round the world’, and watched their incredible Patriot’s Day reenactment. Google the events you are interested in (historical events you’ve studied) coupled with the word reenactment to see if something is available.
3. Visit a Birthplace or a Cemetery
Visit the birthplace of a famous person from your state. Google settlers, presidents, politicians, military heroes, inventors, artists, musicians or any person who correlated with your own interests.
4. Tour Your State Capitol
Most State Capitol buildings offer free tours. The public can even observe legislation sessions, if you schedule your field trip accordingly. This is a great opportunity to learn more about how government works and some historical facts about your state.
5. Take a Civic Field Trip
Tours of your local police or fire department, post office, airport, or campaign headquarters can usually be arranged for groups of a certain size. It’s fun to team up with other local homeschoolers to have access to these tours. We like to bake homemade cookies in advance to thank our civil servants.
6. Visit a Museum
Science museums are fun because they typically provide so many hands-on exhibits for kids, which will really get your kiddos thinking and asking questions. Natural history museums, art museums, and historical museums all over the place. Our local children’s museum has a reciprocal agreement with other children’s museums, so we can get free admission other places with our annual pass to our own museum. Just Google Museum+your city for a list of all the available museums. I’m always surprised at the number of museums in my are I haven’t even heard of!
7. Watch a Star Show in a Planetarium
We have a big planetarium with displays and all sorts of star shows (and IMAX shows) but our local university also has a small planetarium with a very nice telescope and star shows. The university planetarium is staffed by enthusiastic astronomy students who want to share everything they have learned and who are willing to spend hours (okay, that’s an exaggeration) helping my kids find things with the telescope.
8. Explore Your Community
Call around to local restaurants, eye doctors, dentists, and veterinarians and ask if they give tours. Once we took a tour of a local pizza place, and they let each of the kids make and bake a pizza to take home. Be sure to consider unusual community offerings, too, such as mining operations, movie studios, newspapers and such. Many business owners love to talk with children about what they do and your students just might discover a future career.
9. Visit a Farm
We live on a farm, and my kids have their daily farm chores, so they are not particularly enthralled with farm animals. But before we bought our farm, one of their favorite places to visit was a local farm with a small petting zoo. It’s funny how kids want to milk cows until they have to.
10. Visit the Zoo or the Aquarium or a Pet Store
Kids and animals just go together, don’t they? Our local zoo has several free days during the winter, and the aquarium has one homeschool day each year when homeschoolers can get in free with an affidavit. If you don’t have a local zoo or aquarium, even the pet store can make a really fun and educational field trip.
11. Learn About Bees
Speaking of animals, wouldn’t it be interesting to visit a beekeeper and learn all about bees?
12. Learn About Your City’s Public Works (Water, electricity, sewage…)
I don’t know if all water treatment facilities are as interesting as ours, but we really enjoyed touring our local water reclamation facility. Some more favorites have been touring the hydroelectric dam below Lake Powell and the Bonneville Lock, dam and fish hatchery on the Columbia River near Portland, Oregon.
13. Factories are Fascinating
Factories will often offer educational tours. We’ve toured several, from Sweet’s candy factory and Don Julio’s tortilla factory (both give out free samples!) to an Intel factory that produces computer chips, to the Waterford Crystal factory in Waterford, Ireland.
14. Try to Visit All the Parks in Your County
I don’t know about you, but we have some awesome parks nearby. One is a giant reservoir where we can swim, canoe and paddleboard during the summer and ice skate and sled during the winter. A couple of our parks have phenomenal rope climbing equipment. We have skate parks and bike parks, and a few of our parks have amazing splash pads. Parks can be just as interesting during winter as summer.
15. Hike in a National Park
As a resident of Utah, National Parks are one of our favorite places to learn. It’s amazing how much you can learn from hanging out in a national park!
16. Tour a Bank
We toured the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C. once, and watched their process for creating and destroying money. That was interesting. But it could be really interesting to tour a local bank, too. They probably won’t show you their vault or anything that requires security clearance, but they can show you how the tellers work, how the automated tellers work, and talk about the jobs all of the employees do. It would be fun to let your kiddos open a savings account at the same time.
17. Shop for Groceries
Touring the grocery store is one of our favorite homeschool field trips EVER. They took us back into the bakery to watch their big mixers at work and taste bread samples, then through the refrigerator where the kids learned about produce and picked out an apple, then through the freezers where all the kids got to sample some ice cream. If your kiddos help you menu plan (learn about good nutrition), budget (learn about personal finance), and actually purchase your groceries (they learn about money and arithmetic) this can be an incredibly educational field trip!
18. Learn How Your Favorite Foods are Made
Speaking of groceries, wouldn’t you like to learn how your favorite foods are made? Is there a creamery near you? How about a bakery? Or maybe you’d like to visit a cheese factory and see how cheese is made. We visited a fascinating maple syrup farm in Vermont a couple of years ago.
19. Visit a Hospital
This is especially meaningful if you have a friend or loved one in the hospital. But make sure you call ahead and see whether a nurse will have time to show you around. The hospital has really cool machines they can tell you all about!
20. Base Your Field Trip on Your Children’s Interests
Do you have an animal-lover in your house? Call your local animal shelter for a tour. Do you have a young artist? Visit an art gallery or two. Young thespians will be inspired by the theater and young cowboys by the rodeo. Don’t forget to check sports venues — I know most of the big ones offer paid tours. Or find an active archaeological site and volunteer to help dig! Using your child’s interests to generate field trip ideas guarantees a successful field trip.
21. Don’t Forget the Library!
After all, isn’t the library a homeschoolers best friend? I’m sure your local librarian would be happy to give your family a tour of the library and show your kiddos how it runs.
22. Check out Science and STEM festivals
Here in Utah, all of the STEM-related industries get together and put on a STEM fest every October. Each company hosts a booth where they explain and demonstrated something related to their business. There are always hundreds of booths, each with hands-on experiments, demonstrations, cool gadgets and lots and lots of information for your kiddos to wonder about. Both of the major universities in my area also host science weeks. One holds a chemistry week and invites the public to view classes and displays put on by the students, another holds a biology week and even opens the cadaver lab to families who sign up in advance. Google will help you look for things like this in your area.
23. Look for School Days at Cultural Events
You can often find discounts to the symphony or to see musicals or plays. We’ve been to the symphony for free, and we were also able to go backstage and see several instruments and talk with the musicians. We also had the same experience at the ballet. Just google a local event with school days (e.g. ballet+west+school+days) because most of those events have time set aside for schools. Homeschools are schools and are able to reserve free tickets as as such.
24. Look for Discounts to Try New Things
If you search Groupon locally, you’ll find all kinds of things you never even knew were things. Maybe not all of them are worth your time, but some of them could make really fun, educational field trips!
25. Worldschooling Field Trip Ideas
Okay, this field trip idea is not even close to cheap, let alone free. But it will be well worth the investment! Plan a vacation around something your family is studying. After studying Geology and volcanoes, we visited Mount St. Helens, Crater Lake, and bowling ball beach. After studying Marine Biology, we visited various tide pools in California. After studying Chinese history and culture, we visited China. Because these field trips are more costly, you probably can’t take them as frequently, but they sure are fun to intersperse with local, free field trips!
Pin these fun field trip ideas for later!
Please share your field trip ideas in the comments below!
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