Homeschool Memoirs #11 {Field Trips}

THEME:  This week I’d like to invite you to share your favourite field-trip that you’ve been able to go on since you’ve started homeschool. I’d encourage you to include photos, but you don’t have to.

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Oh man... we have been on so many cool field trips, it is very hard to pick out one that is the all-time favorite.  Since I'm already very late in getting this Memoir posted, I will save myself a lot of time and trouble by copying from previous blog entries!



In May I listed several great trips that our family has experienced, including:

A church-sponsored field trip to Hope Acres (a dairy farm)  (my blog entry about it is here.)

We live close enough to Gettysburg that we can visit Gettysburg National Military Park often, and we do.

On vacations, we have enjoyed some great "field trips" - we have been to Taliesin in Wisconsin.  I blogged a little about it here.

We have also visited The World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, which I definitely counted as a history lesson!  Our family loves to visit Disney World, although we haven't been as often as we would all like.  Our family vacation to Alberta, Canada this past November gave us the chance to spend a day in Banff National Park, which was very educational as well as being lots of fun!  I blogged about that day in three separate entries.

I was able to take my oldest two boys on an all-day field trip to Philadelphia.  Another three part report.  We saw the historic city...

...and the Franklin Institute, which was featuring the King Tut exhibit at the time:

Since that blog entry, we've also taken the kids to a Zamboni factory, and I took my oldest on a mission trip to Honduras - which is kind of like a field trip.  I won't dig up more pictures and links to those trips now, if you're interested you should be able to find them in the Show & Tell category in my sidebar.  Or just browse around my blog, I won't mind!



In an entry in May of 2007 I declared our MOST memorable field trip to be Camp Flintlock.  This was a weekend encampment near St. Mary's City in Maryland.  A group from our homeschool fellowship went together to experience a little bit of life as it might have been in colonial and revolutionary war times.  We slept in tents with straw ticks under our sleeping bags (I heard later that a couple of families "cheated" and brought in air mattresses, but not us!), dressed in period clothes, were awakened by drum call, gathered firewood and hauled water, cooked over an open fire, made crafts, played colonial games, and we even learned how to throw a tomahawk and shoot a musket!  When we signed up for the encampment, the boys were not very eager to go, especially when I told Harrison he would NOT be allowed to take his personal CD player along!  But my guess is that they really enjoyed the weekend - they talked about it for long afterwards, even occasionally asking if we could set up a tomahawk target in our backyard.  And yes, we have strongly considered doing that!  Landon particularly enjoyed chopping wood and tending the fire. 



Photos:

Here's our family portrait, taken in front of the tent we called home for two nights:



 Tending the fire:



My turn at the cooking pot:



Landon LOVED chopping wood:





Hauling water:





Harrison shooting a musket:



And Spencer's turn:





Don't get on my bad side - I know how to throw a tomahawk!!!





And a camp picture:





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