This month, my homelearner and I went on a really big field trip. The field trip was so big that it began in December and ended this past weekend. We went to Costa Rica for a month, the result of a year of saving and planning. Now we’re back in the cold and wet of the Pacific Northwest, and I am longing for good mangoes again. What can I say? The field trip was for me too.
One of the joys of homelearning is that you have the flexibility to do things off the school schedule. While most families are planning their spring vacations or summer adventures, you can head off to the tropics in January instead of going to school. Or you can simply go for an overnight trip to a nearby town to see the salmon run or the eagles feasting on the salmon – we’re planning to do that too. Many local trips require very little money, and if you do them at times when school is not in session you can get excellent off season rates.
Why go on a really big field trip? Well, I love traveling, so I want my daughter to have that love too. I want her to experience the ways that people live in other places in the world. Five year olds are remarkably accepting about many things that we coddled adults might complain about. Give my kid really different living conditions, and as long as she has a routine and a parent present, she adapts. My child who stated that beans and rice were both gross before she left found herself eating it three times a day and asked for it the day after we got home. I like that about five-year-olds. I want her to stay adaptable and accepting for as long as possible.
I want my daughter to not only experience travel but to experience life in another place. We do this by staying in one place for a while and getting to know it as a home. We stayed on a dairy farm in Costa Rica for three weeks, which gave us a consistency and a rhythm and a connection to one place and one family.
There are also the language benefits of going abroad. Granted, we spoke English in our room so she didn’t get Spanish immersion, but she did pick up a number of words in Spanish and spoke them to others. Again, I think that learning that others speak all sorts of languages and that it can be fun to speak in other languages is a good lesson for a small person, building a foundation for an interest in languages in the future. We are fortunate that our language is the dominant language of world travel, but this is also unfortunate, since it often leads travelers to speak only in English instead of experiencing the joy of communicating with people in their own languages. I was always shy about speaking other languages because I only learned them from textbooks: this trip was the first one where I dropped that fear and just spoke in Spanish, no matter how awkward I sounded. As someone who has taught speakers of English as a Second Language, this was a humbling and engaging experience for me.
And these are just the cultural benefits of going on a Really Big Field Trip. Tomorrow, I’ll talk a little bit about what we did in Costa Rica and how it works into learning about science and nature.
Image courtesy of johnnyberg at Stock Exchange.