Field Trips can be full of Learning and Fun {TOS Crew Review}

I don’t know about your homeschool, but in our homeschool we live for field trips.  Field trips can be full of learning and fun too!  We love to visit all kinds of places and call it a field trip. We recently got to review the Exploring Creation Field Trip Journal through Apologia Educational Ministries that helps us record all of our fun field trip moments.

There are so many things you can record in this book.  It’s not limited to what the majority of people think of as a field trip either.  Remember our motto “Field Trips can be full of Learning and Fun” when you think of places you visit.  How about a field trip to the park?  What about when you do your grocery shopping?  A nature walk is a fun field trip or even a nature drive through the back roads!  Let your imagination be the limit!

We take a field trip every week in our homeschool and I am hoping that I can get caught up and start blogging these more often!  The past few weeks I’ve had to get creative though.  In the month of May there were only 3 days the whole month that we didn’t get rain!  We’re floating away over here!  

So this past month we haven’t had our weekly nature walk.  We haven’t been able to drive around the local National Wildlife Refuge(too muddy) but we DID take a trip to see the Missouri River at almost flood stage!  We DID take a trip to an indoor Nature Center.  We DID go to a zoo and enjoy all their indoor and outdoors exhibits on one of the non rainy and very sunny days(I have the sunburn to prove it). 

Some field trips that we have taken that you might not think of as field trips were simply going to the library, going to get groceries, getting the oil changed in the van, etc.  There are so many things that can qualify as a field trip if you just specify they have to be full of learning and fun.

We loved the Exploring Creation Field Trip Journal.  It gave us space to write, draw, and be creative!  The Journal is spiral bound so it is easily portable plus easy to hold and use.  It is notebook size at 8-1/2 inches by 11 inches and contains 64 pages long.  The journal is divided into several categories.  Don’t let the categories overwhelm you though as they explain how to use them at the beginning of each.  

Some of the fun you’ll find inside:

• preparing for field trip page: These pages take your child through the steps of preparing.  What will they need?  What do they want to learn?  It lets them prepare the whole week before, night before, on the way to, etc.
• an overview section where you can write all the different field trips and the day they occurred 
• specific trip pages.  This is where you put the specifics of each trip.  Where did you go?  What did you see?  What books did you read to go along with this?  Did you do any reports?  List all that here.
• As I see it pages.  This is where you draw your favorite spots or things from the trip.  My kids all had a lot of baby animals to draw here from our zoo trip.  We lucked out!
• Special spot pages.  This is where they can draw and record one spot through all the seasons.  They show the changes and what the year does to who is there and what is there.  We opted to choose this spot along our nature walk path since we do that so often and it’s on our own land.  
• map section!  Show off all the places you’ve visited on the map!

I also want to mention that there is a code inside the front of the journal that gives you access to online helps and extras.  You’re going to want to use this.  It’s pretty awesome!  We haven’t used a lot of Apologia products but can say without a doubt that everyone we have used is one that we’ve LOVED!  

We truly loved using this journal to tell about all the field trips we’ve taken.  It’s very easy to use and has enough color and fun to keep the kids engaged as they use it.  My kids really were begging to use this and take it everywhere with them. My oldest loves to draw and this was going everywhere with her and her sketchbook.  Her suggestion is that they have more blank type pages for her to put sketches on.  All the other kids though they had plenty of room to draw in.

As a mom I really enjoyed my kids using this book.  I knew that as long as they were adding their experiences to this that they were helping to cement what we had learned without me having to drill it through them.  It’s always good to know that your child is learning and having fun!

Want to see what everyone else did with their journal?  Check out the main TOS Review Blog main page for all of the other reviews.  Also make sure to check out Apologia by finding them on facebook, twitter, pinterest, and Google +.