Our family has always made field trips a priority in educating our kids.  We want to take them on adventures to inspire, explore, inquire, and gain knowledge from first hand experience and hands on explorations.  Apologia Educational Ministries has a new resource to help your kids capture their field trip experiences, thoughts, and fun memories in the Exploring Creation Field Trip Journal.   We were sent one for review a few weeks ago. We were excited about trying out this scrapbook-journal method for creating a memory book of our fun learning adventures.

Apologia is one of our favorite homeschool curriculum companies.  They have a wonderful variety of high quality products, and we were pleased with this new addition to our homeschool.

Field Trip Journal

For Kids of all ages.
Spiral Bound
Heavy duty
64 colorful pages printed on card stock
Retails for $22

Encourages kids to write about their field trip experience in creative ways.

Table of Contents

• Prepare a field trip (with helpful tips like check lists for planning, before, during, and after).
• Over 100 Field Trip Ideas
• Places I have explored maps (for your state, country, and world).
• How to use Specific Trip Pages
• Field Trip Pages (for 10 field trips)
• How to use My Special Spot pages
• My Special Spot Pages  (a special spot is a 20 x 20 spot you sit and draw what you see 4 times a year, 1 time during each season, and notice how things change with the seasons).
• How to use As I See It pages
• As I See It (pages at the back of the journal can be used for illustrating what you see).

How We Used This In Our Home

I was really excited to receive the Field Trip Journal from Apologia for review and I was hopeful this would give us motivation to start creating a memory book of our fun learning adventures. I take hundreds of pictures of everything we do, daily, but seldom print them off my computer other than to create a yearbook page or mail to family because printer ink is expensive.   Most of the time, pictures just stay in digital format and get posted on social media or on this website.  But I realize that isn’t always the best thing.  Kids like to look over pictures too, and I hope this Field Trip Journal will get us int the habit of printing a few of our pictures, and writing down what we learned.

For each field trip, my son included a small map to show the location, and one picture (we tried to use two to three pictures per page) as well as a description of the field trip and any books you read, and what he did and what he wants to remember about it.  I was thrilled that he was motivated to use the journal.  He plans to use every section of the journal from cover to cover.  He did say he wished there was room to record more than 10 field trips, because we do so many, but I told him if we need to, we can convert other pages at the back of the book.

Here are four of our recent field trips completed during this reivew and recorded in his journal:

Nature Study Field Trip

Field trip to explore nature and small waterfall along the creek.

Hueston Woods State Park Field Trip

The way I see it, kids need to experience life hands on, and they can’t experience much in an 8am-3pm classroom sitting at a desk.  Kids were made to move, explore, touch, run, laugh, and learn through play and hands on explorations.

We have dumbed kids down both mentally and physically in the USA, by locking them into an 8 hour a day public education system that restricts physical movement.  This can causes childrens growing spines to become disfigured and grown in an S shape instead of a J shape.  Sitting in classrooms all day leads to week core muscles from a lack of activity, even though some kids play sports, the majority of kids have weak bones, week muscles, and a week spine.

Many kids are medicated to force them to sit still and be quiet in class.   Besides making them more prone to to back pain, joint pains, and serious health concerns, many children end up with a life long battle with meditations to try and fix the lack of physical freedom they experienced in childhood.

I would encourage families to explore the option of taking family field trips, and homeschooling and all the wonderful learning opportunities and physically freeing opportunities homeschooling offers for developing bodies and minds.

I remember school days being so boring growing up. I enjoyed after school activities, and a few electives like music and track, but classroom time was usually a snooze!  I would literally stare at the clock watching the seconds and minutes pass by in most of my classes.  It was torture to have to sit still all day!  We only took a school field trip once or twice a year and had a field day once a year.  What kind of life is that for a kid?  Forget that!  I am forging ahead and excited about the next adventure.

Jimmy John’s Field Trip

We set out to find out if Jimmy Johns was as good or better than Subway.  Was it as good as everyone says?  How does a restruant like this become so successful?

Our stop at Jimmy Johns was a new experience for us.  The shop has a fun atmosphere and special names for every submarine sandwich.

The sandwiches have a fixed description, and that is what is in the sandwich.  This is the real secret to how fast you are served, no one is standing around deciding what fixings are going in their sandwich.  Instead you choose the sandwich design from the menu that best fist your tastebuds.

We let the children choose their sandwich, and choice of chips, and we all had waters to drink. The bread is very soft and fresh.

I have another post for you to read more about this fun field trip to Jimmy John’s and all we learned.

Loveland Ohio Castle Chatue Laroche Field Trip

My kids go on field trips at least 3 to 4 times a month!  It is a regular part of our school learning. They know they can look forward to going somewhere each week.  So they work hard on their school work and projects early in the week and prepare to go on some kind of adventure towards the end.  Sometimes we go on Fridays, but most of the time, we go on the weekend so we can include Dad in our learning adventures too.

The Exploring Creation Field Trip Journal has helped us keep up with a scrapbook style journal of our recent outings.   We usually keep what they want from our trips (brochures, pictures, postcards, etc) in their portfolio.   But now with this journal, they have a fun place to record their memories too.

The way I see it, kids need to experience life hands on, and they can’t experience much in an 8-3pm classroom.

Check back soon to read the post about our field trip to the castle.

I would recommend school aged kids everywhere keep a fun journal of their learning adventures.  This will be a great way to look back on your year and be reminded of the wonderful time you had and all you learned about.

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Be sure to check out what other homeschool families on the TOS Review Crew had to say about using the Field Trip Journal in their home.