YMB #90 Travel: A Conversation with Dachelle McVey

Pam: This is your morning basket, where we help you bring truth, goodness, and beauty to your homeschool day. Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 90 of the, your morning basket podcast. I’m Pam Barnhill, your host, and I am so happy that you are joining me here today. We’ll on today’s episode of the podcast. We’re going to be talking to homeschool, mom, Dachelle McVey, and we’re going to be talking all about how she combines, travel and learning to create these wonderful hands on experiences for her kids that go well beyond the textbook and get them up and outside and into the world. I think you’re going to be inspired by this conversation. I certainly was actually, I got off the conversation with Dachelle, went on a walk with my husband and we planned a field trip for the very next day, because I was just so inspired by everything that Dachelle had to say. So we’re going to get on with that in just a minute. [spp-transcript]

Now, speaking of inspiring things for your homeschool, we would love to help you find the easy button to add more morning, time to your homeschool. Maybe morning, time is something you’re doing already, or it’s something you want to do. And you’re just like, I’m a little bit overwhelmed by this idea. What we have for you is your morning basket. Plus in your morning basket, plus we have over 50 sets of morning time plans that you can use, plus our monthly explorations clubs to help your kids explore.
And it’s really fun because in our monthly explorations, which cover all kinds of topics from farms, snow, and ice, George Washington, Carver space in the Holy land, we even have ideas for you of things to do with your kids, things to strew for your kids and for more exploration ideas that help you get outside of your home and explore the topic a little more.
So we help you out by including the field trip ideas in the plans just for you. So I invite you to come on over and check this out, come to Pam barnhill.com and hit the green, get the tools button to see what your morning basket plus is all about. And now on with the podcast, Dachelle McVey is a homeschooling mom of three living in the South with a love For giving her kids outside the box opportunities for learning, especially if it means a chance to travel on her blog, hide the chocolate.com Dachelle shares about homeschooling parenting and how she incorporates travel into their homeschool culture. She is also the author of a large collection of literary adventure, online book clubs for all ages, from preschool to high school covering topics from literature to nature study. Dachelle welcome to the podcast.
Thank you Pam, I appreciate the chance to get to talk to your listeners again. Well, I am so glad that you are here and just start us off by telling us a little bit about you and your homeschool. How long have you been homeschooling those kinds of things? Sure. So I started out as a teacher at a private Christian school where my son attended and there was quite, there’s quite a bit of space between my oldest to the six years. So my youngest was just starting there. And one of the things I started realizing was there, wasn’t a lot of opportunity for field trips and fun and things like that. And so I started looking into homeschooling as kind of this way to have a little more fun with my family. And so we kind of started homeschooling.
My oldest was already about high school, which is not what I would recommend. It’s hard to get a high schooler into homeschool, but the two younger ones were pretty young. So now I have a 21 year old. Who’s a senior in college. I have a sophomore in high school and a seventh-grader in middle school. And we’re what we call relax, Charlotte Mason homeschoolers, because we love the idea of literature. As you mentioned, I read a lot of literature book clubs, but we liked that basis, but we don’t follow strictly everything that Ms. Mason said. We like to think of it as she was a modern Charlotte Mason in the 21st century. So we kind of followed that line of homeschooling, but we’ve been homeschooling for probably about seven or eight years now. I don’t even know to be perfectly honest. They might be longer than that.
Okay. I am going to say that you are the first person ever, who has told me that they started homeschooling for the fun of it. I mean, I mean, I love homeschooling. I have fun homeschooling.
I enjoy homeschooling. I always say in the macro sense, if not always in the micro sense, but I don’t think I’ve ever met another person who said I started homeschooling because I felt like it was going to be fun. So that’s awesome.
Well, we, you know, That’s so true about us. A lot of people say they started homeschooling because their child had this issue that they wanted to work with her.
They had this issue with the school, but we were really quite privileged. Honestly, we live in a very small town and in this small town, we had a great Christian private school next door that I had actually gone to as a kid, they allowed me the opportunity to teach. So it was actually a wonderful experience. It wasn’t something that I would say that was miserable and we hated it.
There were aspects of it that obviously didn’t like as much because I felt like they couldn’t do as many things as they did when I was a kid. Cause you know, there’s so much structure and so much, you know, teaching to a test and that type of thing that I thought, wow, we could do so much more and have so much more fun if we were at home because we could really branch out and study things that weren’t necessarily on that core curriculum.
So yeah, we are a little bit different as far as why people start homeschooling.
I love it though. I absolutely love it. So have you always been a big traveler? I mean, it was something that would probably never occur to me that this is going to be the catalyst for my homeschool is travel. So is it something you’ve always done?
Yes. My father was a huge traveler. He would take us all the time to historical sites. He was a history teacher and so we’d have to go visit this battleground or, or this historical site, but he loved to travel and he would love to just hop in the car and do road trips. And that my sister and I have very much been like that, that anytime we can escape to get away, we do that. So yeah, pretty much my entire life I’ve been like that. Oh, I love that. And I love it. It was the history teacher in him that, you know, kind of translated down to you and now it’s why you homeschools. So exactly. Well listen, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on was because you really have such a unique approach and I think it’s something that could be brought into a morning time situation.
So when your family is going on vacation, you have this unique way of making that upcoming trip a part of your homeschool. So tell me a little bit about how you do that.
Okay. So like I said, we wanted to start homeschooling for the fun of it. I had noticed that the things that I thought were great from school, what I remembered from school was the hands-on things, whether that was an experiment in the, you know, in the cafeteria or that was going out to see something in nature or going to a play or whatever it was, those things weren’t available for my children.
And I think we see that a lot that a lot of those things have been cut from the school system, whether that be a private or public, whatever the traditional school system was. So I was that mom who was always, you know, taking my kid out of school to go on a trip and I’m having to explain to the principal, okay, we’re going here to do this. And so my kid’s going to be gone for a week and it was fine when he was in elementary school. But as he got older, it got to be a little harder for me to convince the principal that he needed to skip two weeks of high school to go on this overseas trip with us, even though I knew he was going to learn way more by being on this trip than he would be being in class. And I think the principal knew that too, but it was hard to justify that when she knew that he was going to have to make up work and we’d have to explain this to other kids, blah, blah, blah. So the catalyst for us, for us to homeschool was I want to go to Italy. It was a dream of mine for ever that I could, as long as I can remember is to go to Italy and it kept getting put off because I would have a child and mess up my whole plans and then I would be nursing and couldn’t go to Italy.
And finally we just said, okay, we’re going to go. And we’re going to take the kids with us to go. It was going to have to be two weeks. You just really can’t do a trip to Italy and less than that, if you want to get around and see other cities. So we, you know, we decided we were going to have to take the kids out of school and that just wasn’t going to work.
So I thought, well, Hey, let’s, you know, our friends are homeschooling. Let’s see if we can pull this off and okay, well, if we’re going to go to Italy, I don’t want to just go to Italy and we see a bunch of things and then we come home and that’s the end of it. I want them to really experience Italy, like from the history of the culture, all aspects of it.
So we literally that very first year of homeschooling started by having an entire homeschool devoted around Italy. So, so we, we really pulled it into probably every aspect, except for maybe math. It’s really hard to pull Italy into math, but that we started that that year. And from then on, we’ve gone on many, many, many different homeschool trips, but we always have done that. It started with teaching the kids beforehand about where we’re going, the culture or the language or the history of that era area, so that when we get there, they have a basis of what they’re seeing and they understand, and it makes it more of those moments of going, Oh, wow, mom, look, we learned about that. Remember, and this is where we’re at. So it adds a lot more to them. And I think they remember things better that way. I think so too. I think, you know, just knowing what they’re looking at before they get there would just enhance the trips so much instead of getting somewhere.
I know, goodness, I guess it was two summers ago. Now we went up to Niagara falls with the kids for, we were gonna go to the homeschool convention. And so we took the kids up to Niagara falls and we ended up going to Fort Niagra and it was great. It was a good day trip, but we didn’t know we were going before we got there.
And so I was like, man, this would have been so cool to be able to teach the kids about, you know, the period of history that the reenactors were, you know, walking around with their costumes on and the buildings when they were built and what the Fort was used for. They would’ve gotten so much more out of it if we had spent a little time in front of that, studying something about it, you know, instead of just kind of stumbling upon it when we got there. So I really, really love this idea.
I agree with that completely. We, we actually went to Niagara falls as a field trip. And that was one of the things that we did is talked about before we, we studied a particular part of history.
So it was cool when they did the reenactors and my kids are actually part of the little reenacting thing. And, and it was cool when we were sitting there in a museum and we’re talking about Edison, we’re talking about Tesla and we’re comparing these things. I mean, we even pulled into, we were doing our chalk pastels and we were doing, you know, our Chalk Pastels of a Tesla and the, and electricity. So, you know, you could pull that into so many different aspects and then you, when they get there, they’re like, Oh yeah, mom, that’s the guy we studied when we were doing art. So it’s really interesting that way.
Oh yeah, that is cool. Okay. So what kinds of things do you do?
What kind of things do you include when you’re getting ready to take a trip? And I’m just going to like, so you went to Italy, did y’all learn some Italian before you went well, some of us more than others, My husband is, can pick up so many languages, especially the romance languages. He’s, he’s really good at that. And he was able to pray basically in a week or two, learn everything I’d spent the last nine months trying to learn. Cause I am not an linguist by any shape of the imagination, but yeah, we actually, I decided that we were going to learn a little bit of everything. So we started with Roman history, which, you know, that’s exciting in and of itself. And we started the whole year curriculum of doing Roman history, studying in history, which was easy, so easy to pull into our Bible. Cause then we could talk about Julie Caesar. Then we could talk about the apostle Paul. And it was just really cool to put all those things together in history. So they saw who was actually around at this time, it brought so many things closer for them to understand.
And for me, for that matter, I never really thought about, and in historical times who lined up with whom, and then of course we went into our art. We learned so much, we went to the Renaissance and instead of all those amazing artists and, and we went to learned about the musicians and we went to operas it local operas in town to, to hear some of those things. And then when we got Italy, the cool thing is one of our favorite operas was by Puccini. So we actually went to Puccini’s hometown. So I was able to say, Hey, you know, that opera went to, this is his own town. And so we’re riding bikes on the top of the wall of his hometown, you know? And it’s easy. It’s easy to say, we’re going to hope we’re going to Vinci because obviously Leonardo DaVinci, but for people that you may not have known their names before, you may just heard their music. It was, it was cool to pull that together.
So yeah, we, we studied probably everything except for maybe like I said, math, we pulled in everything. And the really great thing about that is if we had gone to Italy and I hadn’t taught my kids anything before them, then we would walked into museums and I said, Hey, look at this, you know, this piece of art or whatever. And the kids would have been like, okay. And after so many, it would have been gotten little boring to them to be honest, but because we’d studied this before, we were able to walk up and say, Hey, look, this is Botticelli. Remember when we studied him? And then I had, at the time, my kids were first grade and third grade, the youngest, The oldest was in was in high school, but they were fascinated by like the David. They just stood there and they were sketching it. And I was like, wow, this is really impressive. That they’re that fascinated by the sculpture to see that something they’d seen in a picture, but now they could see in real life.
And, you know, I had my daughter who’s really more artistic than, than any of the rest of us, the family. She was fascinated by all the art that we were walking through because she had studied those artists. She knew why they sculpted or they painted or whatever, for that reason, they knew how she knew how they created their paints. Cause we talked about it and then she got to see the actual artwork on the wall, which was, which is pretty cool, you know, after studied it for so long.
Totally cool. Totally cool. And I love this idea, you know, so often as homeschoolers, a lot of times we kind of structure our homeschool around, you know, history. I think that’s one of the big kind of defining spines of, well, we’re going to study the middle ages next year and everything kind of falls in place around it.
But when you use geography as a center point for your homeschool, then you’re able to pull in history. But you’re also able to pull in, you know, things like science, you were talking about, you know, the electricity at Niagara falls and Tesla and things like art, you know, and history and language and literature and so many other things.
So it’s, we don’t often think about arranging our homeschools around geography like this, but it’s a perfectly legitimate way to arrange your homeschool.
Oh, I hope so. Cause I keep doing it. So about how long before a trip do you spend teaching about the place that you’re going to travel to? It depends on the trip. So when we were going to Italy, that was a very different place than where we live. So, you know, different culture, different language, so many things were different than we spent pretty much the entire year studying about Italy. Now, when we’ve gone closer to home places like Niagara falls or when we went to New Mexico, those places, we probably only spent like maybe a month and not every subject.
So, you know, we obviously didn’t have to learn another language. But for example, when you went to New Mexico, we were going up to the, see the native Americans, the different, we went all the way up to Taos actually. And we learned all these different cultures that were very different from what we were used to. So we were able to learn about that just by reading about the different cultures.
And sometimes it was science because their food is so different from what we eat, what their natural native food is. Their art is very different than what they use for their art. The natural products that they use was very different than what we’re used. So we learned a lot about those different days, but we probably spent maybe a month on it. So it just kind of depends on what area you’re going to.
And we do local homeschooling. We might spend a day or two talking about someplace we’re going to go to, but when it’s a little bit further away and we have to take a trip, the minimum is probably about a month and then we’ve never done anything other than a year for like, it was for Italy.
Right? Right. Well, on your blog,
you talk about how you make travel journals for your kids for an upcoming trip. So tell me a little bit about the travel journals. Okay. So when we went to Italy, the first thing I noticed was I had these kids have very different parts of their educational journey, you know, one’s in high school. So he needed to be looking at things more critically where a household had a first grader who was barely able to write full sentences at the time.
So I wanted them to remember things and I thought, okay, if I have them kind of journal what they saw that day, then that would help them to remember later on because invariably advocate that comes home and says, well, I don’t remember that trip we took, you know, and that was, yeah. My youngest doesn’t remember the trip to Hawaii.
We took, which makes me sad. So I should have made her journal when she was four. But so, so I just pulled out a little travel journal and I had them write for like five or 10 minutes each day, what, what they saw, what they experienced, you know, something that they enjoyed. It wasn’t like an assignment that I was going to be grading or anything.
It was just simply, Hey, let’s write down what we liked the most about today. And, and it just kind of expanded. And when we went out to Texas, we had stopped at many different places and I realized, okay, each one of these has a little different aspect. So I just created this little simple travel journal. It’s not that fancy, but it was just something to give them a little bit of a boost of like, why were we there? Who are we there with? What were we doing? You know, what was some things that we learned? And I felt like with the kids, seeing it and touching it and then writing it, they were putting all those different things into their memories in different ways.
And they would hold onto those memories a little longer. I love it. We’re going to link to Dachelle’s travel journal post in the show notes. So you can go and have a look at the pictures that she has over there, but Dachelle, so they have prompts in them and then do the kids ever put like photographs or drawings or anything in them?
They can, I, I want this to be very open ended. Like I said, we’re Charlotte Mason. So I want the kids to kind of go with what their feelings are. So I don’t like it to be very specific, like fill in this blank. I want it to be very openness if they wanted to, if they’re too young to write, they might draw something. And as we all know our is to each his own to have a thing. So, you know, even little stick figures of what they learned, I think is important. So they remember that. And then when my kids go back and they look at it, they’re like, Oh yeah, I forgot. We did that. I mean, the funny thing is, is before, before we started talking about this, I went and read the, that Italy article that I’ve written. And I was like, Oh wow. You know, that’s been several years ago. That was our first year of homeschooling. I’d forgotten some of the things we had done until I read that and looked at the pictures like, Oh yeah, that was so great. I love that. So it’s for each of us, we journal it. We, mine might be in a blog. They might be in on their little sketch pads or in their journals, but for whatever’s the best way for kids to memorialize that. I think it depends on each person. Yeah. And then they’ve got that.
They can keep that and they may not always be happy about doing it while you’re there, but they’re not, they’ll be happy that they have it later and it’ll be something that they can look back at. For sure. Exactly.
So let’s talk about field schooling. This is another kind of concept that Dachelle has come up with. Tell me about the I, how did the idea of field schooling come about and what is it exactly? Okay. So when we first started our homeschool, I had a friend who was doing kind of the same things we were and she came up with this idea of field schooling. She, she came up with the name of it and since then she doesn’t do as much homeschooling, but she came up with the idea of field trip and homes and homeschooling put together to be field schooling.
And it really doesn’t have to be as elaborate is going to Italy and spending your whole year absorbed in Roman culture and Italian culture and things. But it’s simply just going outside of your little box. So going outside of your four walls and experiencing things, which could be as simple as experiencing some nature. So you go outside, go to a local park or something along those lines and experience the nature that’s out there.
You know, take your journal, write what you see, notice the animals, insects, the trees, whatever is out there. It can be as elaborate as going to Italy. It can be going to a museum, different things like that. But it’s the, it’s the point of getting outside of your four walls, getting away from the textbook and it being education.
A lot of times we think of field trips is like a little extra added fun. And though it is a little extra added fun. I really think it’s more a part of your education. I think that you can grasp a whole lot more. If you see it, touch it, feel it, and it becomes a tangible part of your education than just reading about it in a book.
So I tell all the parents I’ve talked to is really thinks, think outside your little box occasionally. And don’t worry about if you don’t finish the textbook, because if you study a concept in the textbook and then you go out and you see that concept in life and you see it working and how it works and you’re able to touch it and you’re able to make something work based on what you read in the book, then that makes it even more important to you and makes you remember it more. And it actually becomes a better learning experience. So I think the point is that field trips, although a lot of times they’re fun too, that they actually are a part of the educational experience.
I love that. Like, you know, we’re just talking about something extra that you do.
If you have time, this is actually a true and vital part of education that I think has gotten pushed to the side. These real life experiences have gotten pushed to the side because we just want to sit and read about them in a book, you know? And, and I think where that comes from, and you’ve been a classroom teacher as well, is when you have 30 kids in a classroom, it’s really hard to take a field trip. It’s really hard to, to, you know, you know, everybody has to bring the money in to pay, and that becomes a problem in itself. And you have your logistics and transportation and, you know, having a place that’ll open itself up to 30 kids coming in.
So we default to the books and the books have become so important because we’re teaching to the test. But really we forget because of that, that one of the best ways to learn is to get out and experience things and not just read about it.
Right. And if you look at our history of how we learned until the last century, we learned that way, we learned how to read and we learned math out of textbooks, but then we learned pretty much everything else by apprenticeships and doing, you know, we went on and did things. That’s how we learned it. And you can only learn so much. Like for me, for example, science is not my forte. I actually don’t like it at all.
And I try not to teach as much as possible, but with science, the way I’ve always been able to learn it is to actually do it. So if I’m reading about this concept, it basically, it just becomes this mess of stuff in my head. I’m like, I can’t make it all out. But then once I actually am doing an experiment, I’m like, Oh, that makes so much more sense to me. And there’s a lot of us out there. That’s the way we learn. And, and I wouldn’t hesitate to say, I would almost say 99% of us probably learn better that way, but actually touching something and feeling it and making it work with our own two hands. So I think that’s how we really should be learning.
And maybe the educational system. We’ll get back with a program eventually. I don’t know if they ever will, but as home schoolers, we don’t have to worry about that. Exactly. There was an article and I’ll have to see if I can find it to link to it in the show notes, but there was this fascinating article and I’m just going to have to kind of summarize it as best I can.
It was in like scientific American or something like that. And they were talking about there’s this worldwide like ranking of science, knowledge of different countries. And you know, a lot of times when the United States comes up against other countries in these worldwide rankings about academic subjects, we, you know, tend to be last or low to the bottom of the list.
But actually in the United States, we rank really, really high as adults in scientific knowledge, but school kids in scientific knowledge, we actually don’t rank very high at all. And they started studying this and wondering why in the world do American adults do so well with scientific knowledge, they ranked so high in the world with scientific knowledge, but the kids don’t and what they, the conclusion that they came to was that there are so many kind of the science experiences out there. It’s like tourist science, like going to museums and so many different, you know, like almost every city has some kind of science museum and you can go in and walk around and see all of the different, you know, do the hands-on things and see all the different displays and things like that.
I know in Alabama, we have this space center at Huntsville and we’ve been to a number of different science museums will apparently these do a really good job at teaching American adults science. And that’s where they get most of their scientific knowledge are these touristy science places and our ranking in the world. Our scientific knowledge actually goes up after we leave school because science has done in an interesting way.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, I think back to, like I said, I always said I hated science and I didn’t feel like I was very good at science growing up, but then there are certain things that as I’ve become a homeschooler and gone out there and learned some things I’ve been impressed with, Oh, wow. I really like this.
This is actually really interesting, which I hated in school because it was all reading a book and answering a test. And now it’s more of actually experiencing it. And physics is no longer this horrendous thing that I struggled to make an a in, but now I’m like, Oh, this is physics. This is actually how physics works. It’s fascinating to me.
Yeah. And it’s because you’ve got, you’ve gotten out and you’ve experienced it. And so I think that that just proves your point. It just goes to show that it’s much better to get out and experience these things. And it ended, you know, just sit and read about them in a book. And I will say, so another thing my husband talks about, he went to Virginia a couple of years ago for a school that he was in. And he spent his time there walking around some of the revolutionary battlefields and doing things like that. And one of the things that, you know, we came back and we were talking about it and I’m like, Oh, I’d love to take the kids to some of those places.
And one of the things he said to me is there’s not really a whole lot there. You know, it’s just a big field and there might be some Canon. And so I think this just goes back to you can’t get the impact of an area. You can’t get a lot. Something means sometimes just by looking at it, you have that background knowledge that you put on there, you know, reading Johnny Tremaine or, you know, reading about an area, a good living book about an area before you go to Yorktown or whatever is going to make such a huge difference in what the kids get out of it. So it’s kind of a two-way street. I totally would agree with that. And I agree with it, your husband, about the battlefields. When we went to Gettysburg, I kept thinking good grief. There’s just a lot of Fields. It’s all there is. So yeah, it really is. But I, I do think knowing the story and knowing the impact helps a little bit, it does definitely they’ve really set up there are, you know, some I’ve never been to Gettysburg, so hopefully there’s something there, but they set up some displays or have a, you know, a video or something in the welcome center to help piece it together. So yes, that’s true.
Yeah. Okay. So if a family likes the idea of field schooling, or they want to include more travel into their homeschool, but maybe they just don’t have the budget to go to Italy.
They want to do more of this locally. What are some things that you could do if you think, well, there’s just nothing around my town to do Well. Just so we’re clear, we don’t have the budget To go to Italy once in a lifetime. So It was my bucket list item. Yeah. Most of the things that we do field schooling-wise requires very little money.
Now it requires time and thought. And you know, what, what I was talking about earlier of getting planning, what we want to talk about before we get there, but around where I live, which I’m in the Tennessee, there are so many local parks we’re near the Trail of Tears. So like when we talked about the relocation, the tribes, and we were reading some literature about that, we talked about how that was near us. A fascinating thing for me was my whole life where I live. There’s so many things that talk about the Cherokee nation. However, I’m in. I think my great grandmother was partially Cherokee or something like that, but I’ve never met anybody who is of the Cherokee nation.
So we started talking about the trail of tears, which is nearby. We could easily go to it. Wasn’t expensive. I mean, you just drive over there pretty much. And then when we went to New Mexico, we actually met people of the Cherokee nation. So those are things that don’t actually cost you money. They’re just a little bit of, you know, driving time to get where you want to go. My, like I said, my dad was a huge history buff. So we’ve probably hit every historical place in, you know, the last 200 miles from the house so that we could talk about those different historical things. And as we’ve been going through American history, as we come across one of those parts where we might go, Oh, Hey, this was built in that year. Let’s go visit it. It’s just down the road here. So those are some really cheap and easy ways to do things, to help your children to understand like history beyond that though, you know, there’s community theater, which is usually very inexpensive. So you can learn the arts.
You can, we were just talking about today. And one of my high school literature courses were studying a Midsummer night’s dream. And my co-op kids were talking on a zoom this morning and what I’m saying, Oh, I’ve already seen that. Cause I went to the local community theater and watched it. So there’s really great opportunities in your local community theaters. You can even call up your local artists.
My kids have done some amazing things just by calling up local artists and saying, Hey, can you give them a quick, you know, little lesson on how to make pottery or soaps, or even when we went to a mill and saw them make cornmeal one time, just different things like that, that you can talk to your local artists about or local businesses.
We’ve gone to various businesses and had them explain just how they did things. Lot of towns, people are really eager to show you their trade. It’s, it’s kind of funny. They don’t really want you to spend money to pay for them. They just want to, they just want to share what they do. People who really enjoy doing something like to share it.
So you can ask people around that. You may know, Hey, can we come in? I don’t know, maybe a group of us get two or three families together and do something like that. Then of course you can always just go out and do some nature, walks and nature hikes and go on some local trails and things like that. So there’s a lot of easy ways to get started in it.
Before you take a trip that may be out of state or even out of country. Yeah. We actually went to, there’s a locals, sugar cane. They make cane syrup. And so we went there and the gentleman there showed us around everything. I don’t think it cost us anything. He showed us everything and showed us how they, you know,
mashed the sugar cane to make the cane syrup and everything. And they had a little restaurant there. So we all of course went over to the restaurant and ate after the field trip. But it was just a really interesting little thing. And the kids got to see where cane syrup came from. So maybe, you know, where close to where you are,
you have maple syrup or, or something like that. We’ve also took a field trip to home Depot one time and they set up, but they were so excited to have us there. This was back when the kids were little, but they got little juice, boxes and snacks for the kids and set up a little, the thing where they do the woodworking,
just for our, you know, 10 or 15 homeschool kids that came in, we took a trip to the grocery store. We’ve done the, the auto manufacturing plant. We’ve been to the local army post. So I think there are just so many things out there. If you sit down and start brainstorming, you could probably come up with some really good ideas.
And then the other thing I think is maybe to look at your town like a tourist would, Right? Yeah. I think that’s important because I’ve lived in several different cities. And then after I leave, I’m like, Oh wow, we didn’t do any of the things that tourists do there because you were busy, you know, working and living,
we think about it, but there are so many interesting things that you can do if you, like you said, just take a moment, Google what to do in the city and see what there are It’s to do with kids and your city name and exactly. And to come up, you know, TripAdvisor or somebody is going to have some good results for you,
probably step you haven’t ever thought of doing Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I love it. And I love that idea of field schooling. So what about if you can’t travel, you know, maybe your city or state is locked down. How has, I mean, what have you done this year Dachelle? Okay. So our travel has been limited.
We have not been able to go overseas obviously, but we still have been able to do a few things. Not as much as I would like to, or not as much as normal, but we were able to go out into nature. So we have a local co-op and we’ve tried to get together with them as much as we can and do nature things.
So literally getting outside and, and doing just, you know, observing nature and things. Those are really great ways to just get out of your box for a few minutes and get out of these four walls and look at something different. But there’s all sorts of ways that you can travel. Some that you don’t have to be in large groups or large areas are very congested areas.
We have several local parks here that are national parks, so we can go travel them. They have historical sites there, they have scientific things that we can study. Like for example, a couple of years ago this week, this was before COVID, but we went and studied the estuaries. So we learned about the estuaries and then we actually swam in them and we were able to net a few different creatures to look at.
And so that’s things that you don’t have to have, you know, maybe go in a big area with this congestion and worry about that, that you can just maybe travel a little bit locally to do things, but there’s also some fabulous. And especially since COVID has happened, fabulous virtual tours that are available. Now, most of the museums have them and several sites that you might know,
look up, they have virtual tours of the museums and things. So you can, even, if you can’t get out and do it, you can see it. It’s not as great as being there and touching it. I will never believe that, but it is pretty cool to be able to walk around a museum when you’re not actually walking around a museum.
Yeah. And I would say that the same kind of preparation would work. I mean, you probably wouldn’t want to say, Oh, kids, we’re going to Italy virtually next spring. And so we’re going to spend a whole year studying Italy, but that, that kind of, you know, a couple of weeks of preparation of, you know, if you’re going to do a virtual tour of,
let’s say an automotive plant or a virtual tour of a, you know, maybe there’s a virtual tour of the electrical hydroelectrical thing up in Niagara falls. We’ll just go with that one. Since we both kind of been up in that area and they have a virtual tour of that, you can study, you know, you can spend a couple of weeks studying Tesla.
I had a time or spend a couple of weeks talking about hydraulic energy and how they harness the waters and, and, and that Niagara falls area. And then when you do the virtual tour, it will mean that much more to your kids. So yeah, Maybe even easier to break it apart because like when you’re in Italy, you have to spend all your time.
You’re maximized one of your time, you know, really get that in. I’ve got to go here and gotta go here. And we, we don’t have time to really sit and study in the middle of it. But if you were to say, okay, we’re going to talk about Rome. So we’re going to spend a couple of weeks talking about Rome,
and then we’re going to do a virtual tour around, and then we’ll spend a couple of weeks talking about Venice and then we’ll do a virtual tour of Venice. Then you can actually spread it out and do a really great kind of a unit study over Italy and its culture and its history without actually having to go there. Yeah, yeah. So that,
that would be awesome. And, you know, you said something else that really made me think back to this idea of what can we do locally? And you talked about the estuaries. I mean, this was probably a program that a state or national park in your area was holding, wasn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. It was a, actually it’s a state over it’s North Carolina and they had,
they it’s Fort Caswell and they have a fabulous program up there where you get to actually go and study the estuaries. And we did it as a homeschool group. And, but it’s, it’s fascinating. And obviously you could do it on your own. You don’t have to go with Fort Caswell. You can go to anywhere there is an estuary and study them,
or just go to the beach if you’re living there and ocean go to the beach and try to catch some different creatures and look at them. Yeah. But so many of these, you know, national and even state parks, you think, well, there’s not really anything out there. You know, it’s just in the middle of the woods and there’s nothing there.
But if you contact them, they usually have some kind of program, you know, about w we went to one and we actually went over to Florida to do it. There were tree identification. So it was all about that. All about some different wildlife and lots and lots of stuff about trees. And the guide even took us on a nature, walk into the woods,
but he did a presentation and there were hands-on activities for the kids to do. And like, we’re going on this field trip and the girl who put it together said, I just want to warn you. You have to bring a lunch. There is nothing to eat within miles of us. There are no restaurants truly out in the middle of nowhere, but they offered this wonderful program that the kids could participate in.
So definitely contact those state and national parks. And normally they have their off times, there are times that schools aren’t coming because the schools are testing or, you know, early September when schools are just getting started up. And so those are perfect times that they really love having homeschoolers in because they don’t have a whole lot else going on. Yeah, yeah.
That is, that is absolutely true. Like I said, we live near a national park and it is they’ve, we’ve gone up there to study all sorts of different things from history to science. You just call them cause they really do enjoy it. Like you said, the Rangers are out there and sometimes they don’t have a whole lot to do so they enjoy teaching the kids.
Yeah. Especially homeschoolers because they, you know, every group of homeschoolers I’ve ever been in, they’ve always asked great questions.
That’s true. Do you have any more Tips for mom, you know, for how do they prepare their kids to get out and travel more? No, I would say one is teach the kids that there’s more to education than a book. And I say that being a huge lover of literature,
but I’m really referring to workbooks and textbooks and things like that. But we can read all day long, but until we get outside and experience it, we don’t really always understand what we’re reading. So I’d say start off with small, just little things. If you’re studying American history, okay. Then look around and say, Hey, what’s nearby that I could take my kids to.
That is relevant to this era in history. Or if you’re studying something else like art or something that you might could go to a museum do that I would just say start very small one thing at a time and don’t make it a critical part of your education to see how you feel about it. Because I say that with everything, don’t, don’t jump in and try to do,
okay, we’re going to plan. We’re going to have a field trip every single week, because then you’ll go insane, ah, that’s a lot to be planning, but see how you can add it in and how to incorporate into what you’re doing. Like I said, when American history we’ve been saying that for several years, different parts of it,
it’s just so easy to say, Oh, we’re going to go to colonial Williamsburg because that’s the era we’re talking about right now, or we’re going to go to Gettysburg because we’re talking about now the civil war, it’s easy to see how certain things fit in, but you might be surprised at things that are local to you that will easily fit into your history studies or even your literature studies.
We like lot of times put like my kids, my girls were really into American girls at one time and they took their American girl stories and we put those into our history. And then we did some field schooling with that. So anything that your kids are interested in, start there and then build from there. I love that. Start small and start with their interest.
And that is the way to hook them for sure. Exactly. So Dachelle tell everybody where they can find you online. Absolutely. So my blog is hidethechocolate.com, where I talk about our field schooling and our literature based relaxed, Charlotte homeschooling, you also can find me on Facebook and Instagram at hidethechocolate
And, and if you want to have fun with some of our online book clubs and our literary ventures for kids where it literaryadventuresforkids.com.
Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. There, you have it. If you would like links to any of the books and resources that Dachelle and I chatted about today, including links to Dachelle’s blog with the articles about field schooling and their travel journals,
you can find them on the show notes for today’s episode. Those are pambarnhill.com/YMB90. And Hey, I just wanted to take a minute to thank everyone who had taken the time to go over to iTunes and leave a review for the, your morning basket podcast. The way this works is if you leave a review, iTunes actually shows the podcast to new listeners and more people.
And so we always appreciate it when you do that for us, it means a lot to us. So thank you so much. Now I’ll be back again in a couple of weeks, we’re going to be talking about physical fitness and getting your kids moving and exercising. So I know you’re not going to want to miss that conversation until then keep seeking truth,
goodness and beauty in your homeschool day.