Field Trips for Preschoolers

(36 Months)

Field trips are AWESOME!  They expose us to new experiences and environments.  They can be something fairly simple, such as a walk along a new path in a nature park or a more involved trip to a far away amusement park or museum.  Our four most recent field trips were to a renaissance festival, a children's museum,  a tour of our local fire station and a walk back in time through the jurassic period.

At the renaissance festival we met lords and ladies, pirates and fairies, knights and merchants.  They brought stories to life seeing real people portray characters in fairy tales.  The festival even offered camel and horse rides, sand castle building (and storming), magical shows, fairy tale readings, pirate performances and mermaids singing.  It was a wonderful way to spend the morning.  

The children's museum had a play grocery store stocked with pretend food, baskets and a check out line.  Wild One had so much fun with our grocery game (see our past post).  We took turns asking for items from an imaginary grocery list - please find three tomatoes.  He really liked sorting vegetables by color, gathering and counting specific ingredients and pretending he was both a customer and an employee.  I LOVED the fact that we incorporated math into our impromptu pretend play.  While Wild One was having fun in the grocery store, Little Miss had a wonderful time with Grandpa building with dominos, giant wooden blocks and magnets.  She always seems to gravitate towards the building areas- hmmm, maybe she'll be an engineer or an architect when she grows up?  Little Miss likes constructing.  I'm not sure if she likes it for the art or the challenge- either way, she's learning and enjoying herself.  

Last week, we were lucky enough to be invited to a tour of our local fire station (we belong to an incredible Mommy group that plans wonderful outings for the kids).  The fire fighters showed the kids the life-saving tools and special equipment they use to extinguish fires.  They even took the time to get dressed in their bunker gear so that kids could see first hand what a fire fighter going into a fire wears.  They discussed fire safety.  The fire fighters even did a demonstration with an EKG machine so that children would see that there is nothing to be afraid of.  It was remarkable.

Our last field trip may have been a bit premature, we went on a dinosaur walk.  We tried discussing why some dinosaurs have really long necks and others have horns and sharp claws.  They didn't seem interested in hearing the "why", they did begin noticing one dinosaur has huge teeth and another has tiny arms.  As we were leaving, I told them that we can go to the library and check out books on dinosaurs.  Little Miss's reply, "I love dinosaurs."  Aaaahhhh- I see a new theme approaching.  This March may not have a lot of leprechauns and Easter themed activities, we may go straight into dinosaurs.  

Now that we're home, it's time to start looking for someplace new to go.