Hello, again, and welcome back! Today, I’m writing about my 4th bonus idea to extend my article from last summer that I reposted a few days ago: My Favorite Things: Fun Summertime Activities to Challenge Gifted Kids.
When my two oldest boys were young, I was a Gifted Resource Teacher, so I had every summer off to be with them. The only bad thing was that after a week or two of unstructured summertime every day, well… boys will be boys… and the wrestling, bickering, throwing footballs around the house, etc. would start. To avoid this from happening as much, I came up with an incredibly fun solution that kept them engaged in activities each day to get their energy out (while still preserving downtime each night, too). Maybe one day I’ll write about my Summer Fun Schedule, but for this post, I am focusing on one of the things we did each week- Field Trip Friday!
I’m sure you can guess what FTF was. Every Friday I would take the boys on a field trip to somewhere around town (or even to places within a 30-minute drive of our house) so we could see and learn new things. Usually, the places we visited were museums. I had no idea how many little, obscure museums we had in our area until I started looking for them! The only rule was that we had to go to a different place each week. Here was our routine:
- leave our house in time to be at the museum for opening,
- stay a few hours,
- come back home,
- eat lunch,
- read for 30 minutes, and then
- hit the neighborhood pool.
It was so much fun to explore all of these places (though I always felt bad that my husband had to be at work while we were gallivanting around town)! I do miss those FTF.
Now-a-days, there is a new program related to field trips through our local public library that was not around when any of my three boys were younger: Explore Virginia. This program allows library card holders to check out passes to various museums around the state of Virginia to visit for free (or close to it)! Based on the location of the museum you want to visit, the Explore Virginia program would be phenomenal for a family field trip/long weekend. I’m sure your own state might have something similar to this Virginia program.
On an even larger scale, there are 25 states that offer a State Passport Program for either free or for a small fee. The passport programs encourage families to visit their state’s parks, explore them, and collect stamps (either physically or digitally) for each park.
If you think that’s cool, on an EVEN larger scale, there is the National Park Passport Program (also called, “Passport to Your National Parks”), which is run by a non-profit, Eastern National and affiliated with America’s National Parks (Wikipedia has a good explanation of the program). The idea is the same as the State Passport Programs- go around to the country’s various national parks and collect stamps in your purchased passport book as a souvenir of your visits. I really wish my kids were young again so we could do all of these field trips together!
Hopefully, my “Field Trip Friday” idea inspires you to take a few field trips with your kids or whole family this summer. I think it’s pretty easy to see how gifted kids’ thinking can expand by the exposure to the new information they would learn from weekly museum excursions. In gifted world, we call this “enrichment,” which is when schools (or parents) provide experiences to students that go beyond the core curriculum/basic information. Taking little field trips isn’t the only way to provide enrichment, of course. In fact, every single summertime fun idea for challenging gifted kids I’ve shared is a form of enrichment.
So, what do you say? Are you ready for an adventure to a new museum, state park, or national park? Please share your trips details with me and drop a pic, too. I’d love to see where you went and how your kids liked the trip. Safe travels! ~Ann
Teaching for Talent 