Day Tripping

Rating:
Summary: Road Trip!
Review: Alright, I got to take educational road trips with my children. I found this book was a great guide to get out of the house for my family and take a road trip that was not only educational but family bonding as well. A must read and get out on the road!

Rating:
Summary: For planning a fun and rewarding family vacation
Review: Day Tripping by Teri J. Brown is an exciting field trip and family travel guide offering a variety of field trip themes that are as educational as they are fun. How-to tips for preparing and carrying out trips, as well as inspiring ideas for trips to gardening centers, art museums, dairies, construction sites, and more fill this guide from cover to cover. Day Tripping is not location-specific, nor does it contain the addresses of places to visit; rather it is a compendium of suggestions and advice especially useful for planning a fun and rewarding family vacation no matter where one happens to live.

Rating:
Summary: Turn Tiring Trips into Enlarging Educational Experiences
Review: Do you ever remember really boring driving trips with your parents when you were little? Did you ever ask, "How much longer?" What would you have given for the trip to have been fun for you? Well, if you are like me, the trip should have been a lot shorter and included something I wanted to do.

I have always been fascinated by how human organizations work. I think that interest traces back in part to the many tours my Dad took me on in our hometown when I was very young. He would arrange for some friendly person he knew to show me the "inside" scoop at the ice cream factory, the tortilla factory, the lawn mower repair shop, the car repair shop, a dairy, the fire station, a butcher shop, a farm, a supermarket's warehouse, the local railroad station, and the police station. I could tell he loved those tours as much as I did, even though he learned nothing new. The driving part of the trip was never more than 20 minutes (and usually less than five), and all of the activities were ones that I enjoyed.

That early interest led me into becoming a management consultant and expert on how to make organizations more effective and improve the quality of life for everyone. Hardly a month passes when I do not have yet another chance to make a similar adult-version tour.

When my children were little, I adored taking them on the same kind of tours that my Dad did . . . as adjusted for their interests. It turned out that one of their favorite tours was of our office!!!! Imagine that.

When I was young, I had a friend named Teri Brown who could make a lot out of a little like no one else I've ever met. When I saw that Day Tripping was about taking children on educational day trips, I was hooked. It turns out that this is a different Teri Brown (the age and husband's names are different), but the same talents seem to be present in both women.

Most of us grasp very little from visiting something we haven't seen before. Even when I take knowledgeable adults who are properly briefed on a tour of a factory, I find that they have missed the significance of 95% of what they have seen . . . unless you take four hours to discuss what they have just seen for every hour they spent seeing it.

Ms. Brown clearly understands that point and charts out her ideas to allow your family to find activities it will find stimulating and to fully explore that stimulation in ways that will make the experience more meaningful to them. I think that's an exceptional quality in a book aimed at helping parents become better at helping their children learn.

She develops examples along a number of themes: historical, geological, meteorological, culinary, government, literary, naturalist, industrial production, botanical, communications, artistic and mathematical.

Having done this sort of trip all of my life, I found my horizons being expanded by that list. I'm sure my grandchildren will benefit as a result. Culinary, communications and mathematical were all new dimensions for me . . . but ones that I know I would enjoy.

She also gives you lots of templates to organize your thinking and preparation. In that way, you won't forget to develop an aspect of the trip's potential. For example, she outlines a possible objective for the trip, ways to prepare, how to enjoy the trip, follow-up activities to deepen the learning and possible applications of the new knowledge. You can obviously build on her examples to make the results more customized to your family.

This book will be valuable to all families with children . . . but it will be a Godsend to home schooling parents. The book also provides lots of advice on how to arrange for group tours as ways to meet other home schooling families. I was reminded of this recently when a good friend came to Boston to take his family on a home schooling field trip on American history. If he could have done his trip with other families, the trip would have been much more successful for all.

All books have some weaknesses in them. The main one I noted here is that the author lives in Oregon and her detailed examples are a little more Oregon-centric than would be desirable. She overcomes that bias by talking about what's probably available near you. So I think the book works. But if you happen to live in Oregon, this is an even better book for you!

So where will you go first?


Rating:
Summary: Field Trips to Educate and Inspire
Review: Field trips have educated, excited and informed our family. They have led us down paths of knowledge and understanding of our world, our history and ourselves. ~Teri J. Brown

Teri J. Brown's parents loved field trips and she is carrying on the tradition with her own children. In this guide you will find Field Trips with various themes. The main themes include:

Historical
Meteorological
Culinary
Governement
Literary
Naturalist
Botanical
Communications
Artistic
Mathematical

In the first chapter Teri explains the value of "The Family Field Trip." Then, once she has convinced you that this is a great idea, she moves on to explore the do's and don'ts and provides a convenient Field Trip checklist. Chapter three shows you how to plan an exciting adventure and by chapter four you might be deciding where to go or who to take with you. May I suggest: Travel with Others: Without Wishing They'd Stayed Home by Nadine Nardi Davidson. ;)

Chapter 5 had me intrigued. Hot chocolate and tasty pastries sound good to me. Why not plan an outdoor adventure during the winter? Teri even suggests just walking through your favorite park during the various seasons to observe the changes in wildlife and scenery. By the way, I don't have kids, but these ideas can also be used by couples who are looking for day trip ideas. If you are an aunt or uncle you might find some great ideas for entertaining the nieces and nephews. My nieces love going to one park where the entire park turns into a wildflower heaven. The educational part of a summer trip could be pressing flowers and then making a scrapbook filled with pressed flowers and pictures of the day trip. (Had I read this book back then, I would have pictures to show, but alas, we forgot the camera.)

In order to enjoy the trip all the more, the author suggests some unique ways to prepare for the trip and to make the trip educational. When you get there you can take pictures, take along photocopies notes about the area you are visiting and even do some research online.

Chapter 9 sounded intriguing. "Field Trips with a Culinary Theme." In this section you could do anything from visiting outdoor markets to visiting a cheese factory. Since the author seems to be based in the Pacific Northwest, I recognize some of her favorite haunts. The cheese factory I've been to has some amazing cheese curds to die for. That is where I buy my favorite jams and exotic cheeses. It is closer than the one in Oregon, so I didn't have to travel too far.

Other great ideas included traveling to literary sites and taking a field trip to an art museum. This is an essential guide for parents who are looking to get out of the house and want to give their children the gift of wonderful memories to last a lifetime. My parents took me to Africa on a field trip and we stayed for 12 years. Now that is what I call a field trip.

~The Rebecca Review

Rating:
Summary: Inspiring book!
Review: I loved the practical advice and unique suggestions in "Day Tripping." The friendly tone and step-by-step instructions made me feel that educational family trips were something I could handle, while the many different suggestions made me excited to get out there! I think this resource is going to be a real boon to my kids' education.

Rating:
Summary: Inspiring book!
Review: I loved the practical advice and unique suggestions in "Day Tripping." The friendly tone and step-by-step instructions made me feel that educational family trips were something I could handle, while the many different suggestions made me excited to get out there! I think this resource is going to be a real boon to my kids' education.

Rating:
Summary: Innovative and fun ideas for your next family field trip
Review: Remember Norman Rockwell's 1947 "Saturday Evening Post" cover entitled "Coming and Going?" That was the one where the top half shows a family heading off to vacation in their station wagon, the children all enthusiastic about the trip. The bottom half shows the car heading in the opposite direction with everybody looking completely frazzled (except for Grandma in the back seat with her expression unchanged). The goal of Teri J. Brown's "Day Tripping" is to reverse that process by providing a guide to educational family adventures that can bring innovative and fun ideas to the daunting task of dragging your family somewhere.

"Day Tripping" is divided into two parts. "Part 1, Tripping Out" provides the philosophical values and practical principles of the family field trip. After illuminating the value of family field trips (family bonding, inspiration, love of the natural world, etc.), Brown details a specific list of DOs and DON'Ts for these field trips (e.g., check gas and weather, bring snacks). These things might be self-evident, but make one of these mistakes just once and see how quickly your planned trip explodes in your face. She also covers how to plan your adventure and even how to create field trip groups so that more people can get in on the fun.

"Part 2, A Field Trip for Everyone!" covers a dozen types of field trips, defined by themes. Now, I like to go places and see things, especially if they have anything to do with history. On my honeymoon the route was planned not only to see everything on Prince Edward Island having to do with Lucy Maud Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables, but to take minor detours to see the graves of American presidents, patriots, and victims of the sinking of the "Titanic." So the first section of Brown's guide, "Blasting Through the Past: Field Trips with a Historical Theme" is preaching to the choir as far as I am concerned. "A Walk on the Wild Side: Field Trips with a Naturalist Theme" is also self-evident. Last month I took a trip to the Pacific Northwest and took trips to check out the waterfalls along the Columbia River Gorge and the devastation of Mount Saint Helens. Again, going to see things is an easy sell because we have all these National Parks and pretty pictures on postcards to convince us there are reasons millions of people go each year to see certain sights.

That is why the sections where Brown expands the traditional field trip to include things you would not think of at first is the strength of the book. You fill find "Field Trip Plans" for caves (geologic theme), weather stations (meteorological theme), dairy (culinary theme), county courthouse (governmental theme), fish hatchery (naturalist theme), glass blowing studio (industrial theme), gardening center (botanical theme), television station (communication theme), art museum (artistic theme), and real estate agency (mathematical theme). If it is not obvious to you at this point it should be clear that this book is of value to teachers as well. A lot of these places are going to be easily within driving distance of schools as well as families.

Brown is not intending to be comprehensive in terms of suggestions, because once you start trying to do that the list never ends. So when she talks about trips with a literary theme she provides some choice examples representing different regions of the country: the Home of Harper Lee ("To Kill a Mockingbird") in Monroeville, Alabama; the Homes of Laura Ingalls Wilder ("Little House on the Prairie") in De Smet, South Dakota; and the Beverly Clearly ("Beezus and Ramona") Sculpture Garden in Portland, Oregon. You get the idea from these examples and can certainly find examples of authors in your neck of the woods. There are plenty of sites that will tell you what authors came from your state, perhaps even your city, and the same thing would apply to the rest of these themes. Brown herself provides lots of other ideas for field trips in each section.

With each Field Trip Brown outlines the objectives, what can be done to prepare for the trip, what to do to help enjoy the trip while you are taking it, how to follow-up on the experience, and ways of using the knowledge. There are examples of arts and crafts types projects that you can do for some of these as well as books and websites specific to some of the trips and the general themes. Certainly there are enough ideas in here for you to find something that will appeal to both you and your kids (or your class). If you have a limited amount of time to come up with the next family outing or are looking for new ideas, then "Day Tripping" is going to be a big help.