Field Trips
Who says homeschooling has to happen at home? Most homeschoolers will tell you that they spend almost as much time out of the house as in it. Field trips are learning opportunties that offer fun ways to make every life experience a learning experience. You'll also find tips and strategies for planning, managing, and attending field trips with your homeschool support group.
Resources
Field Trips: Bug Hunting, Animal Tracking, Bird-watching, Shore Walking
With Jim Arnosky as your guide, an ordinary hike becomes an eye-opening experience. He'll help you spot a hawk soaring far overhead and note the details of a dragonfly up close. Study the black-and-white drawings -- based on his own field research -- and you'll discover if those tracks in the brush were made by a deer or a fox.
In his celebrated style, this author, artist, and naturalist enthusiastically shares a wealth of tips. Jim Arnosky wants you to enjoy watching wildlife. He carefully explains how field marks, shapes, and location give clues for identifying certain plants and animals wherever you are. He gives hints for sharpening observational skills. And he encourages you to draw and record birds, insects, shells, animal tracks, and other finds from a busy day's watch.
Appalachian National Scenic Trail
The Appalachian National Scenic Trail is a 2,180-mile footpath along the ridgecrests and across the major valleys of the Appalachian Mountains from Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in northern Georgia. It traverses the scenic, wooded, pastoral, wild, and culturally resonant lands of the Appalachian Mountains. Conceived in 1921, it was built by private citizens and completed in 1937. The trail traverses Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia.
Community Field Trips in Alabama
CiCi's Pizza Field Trips
CiCi's Pizza offers Lunch & Learn Field Trips for school groups. This is a hands-on workshop at CiCi's designed by teachers to help kids develop basic math skills. Students use pizza ingredients and other related items to solve problems, and in the process make and enjoy their very own pizza! They offer beginner, intermediate and advanced math level curricula.
Factory Tours in Alabama
Golden Flake Factory Tour
Golden Flake produces a variety of snack foods including pork skins, cheese puffs and potato chips. Tour their factory and watch how each product is manufactured. The tour is free.
Mercedes-Benz U.S.International Factory Tour
The Mercedes-Benz Visitor Center showcases the history, quality, safety, and innovation of Mercedes-Benz. Offers guided walking factory tours showcasing how the M-Class is built. The factory is located in Tuscaloosa.
Sloss Furnaces
On April 18, 1882, Sloss Furnaces began producing iron and did not stop until ninety years later. Over the decades, Sloss Furnaces gave rise to the city of Birmingham and served as a battleground for economic, employment and social reform. Now recognized as a National Historic Landmark, Sloss Furnaces is open to the public as a museum of industry which speaks to the contributions of the working men who labored there. With its massive furnaces, web of pipes, and tall smokestacks, it offers us a glimpse into the great industrial past of the South and our nation.
Electrified Learning Tour
The best way to learn about electricity is to come see for yourself by touring a power plant. You'll learn how power plants change energy into electricity. Come see each process at work: a hydroelectric dam, a fossil fuel generator, or a nuclear reactor. The tour is free.
Robinson Iron Factory Tour
Robinson Iron is located in Alexander City. Offers a free tour of the facilities that produce cast iron, aluminum and bronze historic reproductions, furniture, lamps, fountains, urns, and more. During the tour you will see the projects that are currently being working on.
Tiffin Motorhomes Factory Tour
Learn about the building of motorhomes with this tour. Tiffin Motorhomes is located in Red Bay, Alabama.
Zoos & Wildlife
Birmingham Zoo
Explore the animal world at the Birmingham Zoo, featuring an alligator swamp, tropical rain forest, and zoo train and carousel.
Mote Marine Aquarium
From its humble beginnings in tiny shed in a small Florida town, Mote Marine Laboratory has expanded to include a 10.5-acre campus in Sarasota, Fla., with field stations and public exhibits in Key West and field stations in Summerland Key and Charlotte Harbor. The Mote Marine Aquarium in Sarasota offers large displays of marine life, mammals, turtles, and aquaculture.
Mann Wildlife Learning Museum
Located at the Montgomery Zoo, the Mann Wildlife Learning Museum offers one of the nation's finest collections of professionally presented North American wildlife. All are shown in realistically created environments including painted mural backdrops depicting the natural habitat of the animal, with sounds of animals and several 'touch and feel' exhibits.
The Wildlife Center
Located in Oak Mountain State Park in Pelham, the Wildlife Center is Alabama's oldest and largest wildlife rehabilitation center. More than 3,000 injured and orphaned wild creatures are cared for each year, including almost 2,000 birds representing more than 100 species. The Wildlife Center is open to the public for self-guiding tours, and features the Treetop Nature Trail. A beautiful, elevated walkway in the woods, the trail offers close-up views of non-releasable hawks and owls in natural habitat enclosures built among and around the trees.
Dauphin Island Sea Lab
The Dauphin Island Sea Lab, founded by the State Legislature in 1971, is Alabama's marine education and research center. Located on the eastern tip of a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico, the Sea Lab offers educational programs, the Estuarium, a public aquarium, and more.
Montgomery Zoo
The Montgomery Zoo features 500 animals representing over 150 species - all in a barrier free, natural environment and divided into continents featuring Australian, Asian, African, and North American realms. Take a rail tour through each realm on McMounty 102, the Zoo's train, and stop by our Gift Shop to find that perfect souvenir.
Field Trip Tips & Guidelines
A Field Trip Should Not Be a Free-For-All
A reminder of the importance of teaching children respect and proper behavior when out enjoying field trips.
Field Trip Guidelines for Homeschool Groups
This letter can be used to establish an understanding about homeschool groups when you organize a field trip.
Field Trips 101
Field trips can inspire your child to study a topic, give him further insights into his current studies, or provide closure to a completed unit. Is there somewhere you’d like to take your children to reinforce a topic this year? Or just want to visit because it would enrich their lives? If you let your support group (or even just a few other families) know that you are planning to go and they are welcome to tag along (think: group rate)—voila! You’re planning a field trip!
Field Trip Guidelines
Some helpful guidelines from Home School Legal Defense Association. The guidelines could easily be adapted as a list for members of a homeschool group. There is also a helpful checklist for field trip planners.
Field Trip Planning Form
Helpful form for getting organized when planning field trips. Free and printable.
10 Tips for Finding and Planning Homeschool Field Trips
While it may be easy to understand the value in visiting the aquarium, history museums and other great field trips, a good field trip can provide much more than interesting facts and new discoveries. Field trips don’t have to be complicated or expensive in order to be effective. These ten tips will help make your planning go smoothly.
How to Plan a Successful Field Trip
One of the highlights of homeschooling is a fun field trip. With the flexibility that homeschooling offers, the world is our oyster, right? Why read about something in a book when you can go experience it firsthand. Planning field trips, however, can be stressful. It doesn’t have to be, though. Read through tips that can help you plan successful field trips for your homeschool group.
Field Trip Report Form
This handy printable form lets your child record a written record of your field trip visit.
The Ultimate Guide to Field Trips for Homeschoolers
Field trips don’t have to be elaborate or cost of ton of money to be both fun and educational. Some of the best “field trips” are a nature walk and park lunch with friends. Especially when your children are young, keep them simple. Nature walks, zoos, and local places like the bakery, pizzeria, greenhouse, post office, police station, fire station, coffee shop, you name it you can tour it!
The Ideal Homeschool Field Trip
Guidelines for planning a great outing with your homeschooling kids. This post is written by an experienced homeschooler who loves to get out and about to learn in a variety of ways.
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Featured Resources
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