Over Hill, Over Dale (Field Trips We Have Known and Loved)
One of the best learning tools we homeschoolers have pretty liberally at our disposal is field trips. We do not have to co-ordinate 33 kids, a bus ride, plus the hassle of permission slips and lunches to go anywhere. We just get on up and GO.
Our most recent field trip was to the birthsite of Gerald R. Ford. My sons were surprised that the former president was born in a regular house, in a regular neighborhood, in regular old South Omaha. When I asked them what sorts of surroundings a future President should be born into, they were certain it should be an opulent palace, in a big city like New York or Los Angeles. They were also surprised to learn that Gerald Ford's birthparents were divorced shortly after his birth, and that his mother counter-filed for her divorce citing abusiveness as her reason for leaving his father. I gathered that the boys figured spouse abuse and divorce were relatively new-age phenomena. A field trip can teach so many layers of lessons.
Another lesson in "layers" concerned the hike we took at the Ak-Sar-Ben Aquarium, near the shores of the Platte River. The woods there have a hiking trail carved through them, which is a moderate level hike for us city-dwellers. It is about six miles all together, with about three hills total. At the end of the trail, there is a wall of rock layers and a board showing how old the Earth was when each layer was made. I found the whole day thoroghly fascinating. The boys liked the layer part, but the hike was a little rough on them. Fortunately, we all have our own G.I. canteens, so they didn't die from thirst, no matter how much they were certain they were going to. We also found out that people come from all over the world to study the Platte River, because it is supposed to be one of the oldest rivers in the world. Our modest little Platte, who knew? Also, along the hiking trail there is a suspension bridge, which is awfully small as suspension bridges go, but the boys had to gather their courage (being about twenty feet in the air on a swaying bridge is pretty scary) and cross it. That is an example of the true "self-esteem building excercises" that occur daily in the homeschool setting.
Of course, we do some things just for fun. A few years ago, we took the boys to the Nebraska Sandhills area just to explore. This area is my husband's favorite place to be in the whole world, second only to his Missouri River bank. It is a rough-hewn area, given mostly to cattle ranching and hog operations. It has sand in it because a few million years ago (the theory goes) a giant volcano somewhere near Idaho exploded and left a sand trail all the way to Iowa. It is a very different sort of place. You can pitch your tent in the middle of a grass pasture, and poke yourself on the cacti growing there, cleverly disguised in the exact same shade of green as the grass. We visited the Happy Jack Chalk Mine, and discovered what diatomaceous earth was, and the way it was mined. The flashlit tour of the mine was spooky, but not nearly as spooky as when my husband reached up and ran his finger along a crack in the chalk ceiling. The tour guide said, "Sir, we ask that you please not do that-someone did that a few years back, and it caused a cave-in that released over a ton of the sand that sits directly over our heads." Dad kept his hands in his pockets for the duration of the tour.
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