Homeschooling field trips are my favorite way to teach and my children’s favorite way to learn. I’m glad you stopped in to join me here at my blog where I keep a record in photos of all the fun field trips we have taken over the years. If you are just stopping in, you might enjoy browsing all our previous field trips. You can start by visiting the links at the bottom of this post.
We have done frightfully few field trips this year compared to most years, but we hope to make that up as the weather gets warmer going forward. Today’s Field Trip Foto Friday is a review of a wonderful trip we took with our co-op in the 2004-5 school year. I believe we did this trip in winter or early spring of 2005. I got stuck in the mud that day turning my vehicle around and some nice local guy happened to have a rope to pull me back on to the road. I just love rural Texas – friendlier people are hard to find!
We got to see not only farm animals that day, but many exotic animals as well. Crowe’s Nest Farm is an animal sanctuary as well as a lively educational farm. It isn’t every day that city kids get to watch a cow be milked and learn how the milk we drink is processed before it gets to the grocery shelves. One of my favorite animals that we saw were the beautiful wandering peacocks – we loved hearing their haunting calls.
Here are some other things they got to do and see:
- Feed a donkey
- Look at the snakes, spiders and amphibians in cages
- See a baby calf
- Ride on a hay ride pulled by a bright green tractor
- See an ostrich and its egg
- Pet and see lots of animals (llama, prairie dog – or was that a gopher?, pony, pig, chickens, goats, squirrel, lemur, etc.)
- Walk through the pet graveyard and see statues dedicated to the pets that have gone on before their owners.
My favorite part of the trip was the “Fairie Wood”. We strolled through the farm’s imaginative Fairie Wood area (Fairie is the Old English spelling of the word Fairy) where they had faces on the trees, tiny fairy-sized mushroom houses, colorful hanging butterflies, sparkling garden eye-catchers, and other interesting things hidden amidst the oaks. The children really enjoyed this area as well. The photo below is one of their smiling trees. We took pictures of the children next to them.
We had a great time – it was a super field trip. I wish we had have gone on a sunny day, though. I think the spring or summer would have been ideal… yet it was nice to have the place all to ourselves!
Quick Links:Sprittibee’s Homeschool Series
2004-5 Field Trip List (First and Second Grade)
Anonymous says
wow we have those pieces on our tree at home too! [You can buy them at garden centers and they’re not too expensive] Don’t know if I’d be brave enough to take mine out on a field trip though, not without a little ‘back up’ in any case. Lovely site – are you a scrapbooker too?
Best wishes
Anonymous says
I, too, have found field trips to be an invaluable resource in my homeschooling. These pictures are great!
Sprittibee says
Thanks mcewen. Yes, I do scrapbook. In fact, the photos above are from two pages of our co-op scrapbook that we did that year that I actually scrapped. The fairy is a drawing I did for that page, and I cut out and scrapped the milk-lesson page as well. I had to cut the two kids that were by the tree (because I don’t usually post other people’s kids without their permission). But there were two kids on either side of that tree. My son was in a photo next to a tree also, but his little friend on the other side is not a family member, so we didn’t include that photo in the post.
Cyndi – Thanks Cyndi! They are not top quality because they are scans of scrapbook pages that have been color-photo-copied into a spiral bound yearbook from our co-op. But, you get the idea from them, for sure. 🙂 I happen to really love the milk jug scrap page. I like using paper cut outs in my scrapbooking. I also cheat a lot and use internet graphics.
Anonymous says
Looks like a super field trip
Lizzie
A Dusty Frame
Anonymous says
You know me–I’m up for anything with faeries!
What a great field trip. And I agree–you can’t find friendlier people than those in small Texas towns.
Sprittibee says
It was really fun, Lizzie. 🙂
faerie rebecca – Yep, I miss Texas.