Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Day #62/175 Days - Field Trip

I had an appointment in the "big city" today. Since I didn't want to loose out on a full day of school, we headed over to one of my favorite places for a field trip - The Maine State Museum. Why is it my favorite?
* It's educational.
* It's free for all educators including homeschoolers!
* It's inside so no matter the weather it works.
* During weekdays, it's very quiet so we generally have the place to ourselves.

Unfortunately, my boys don't always share my enthusiasm for all things free and fun. In order to make things seem new on this trip, all the boys did a scavenger hunt.

Lego-Man did one I made up on the spot. It was a photographic hunt. I originally wanted him to find photos of each letter of the alphabet. He wanted something with a bit more of a challenge. Instead he had to find objects that represented each letter of the alphabet. Here are some of my favorite finds of his photos:







He did end up merging the two techniques but I'm still happy with the results. It kept him engaged just about the entire time and he appeared to have a good time. That's hard to do with a 13 year old at times.

Conductor and Happy completed scavenger hunts that the museum itself has for school groups. One is for younger children so Happy did that one. It had drawn photos of some of the items in the museum. Once he found them he checked them off. My favorite was the stone knife he needed to find. He kept calling it the "cookie cutter." He managed to find just about all of the items in his list.

Conductor's hunt was a bit more challenging. It required him to read about the different displays to find answers to questions on his paper. He did okay with this but his interest started to flag near the end.


The two newest exhibits - "At Home in Maine" and "Uncommon Threads" were not included in the scavenger hunts so we let the boys just check those out and enjoy them.

I think the boys did have a good time and I know we'll be going again at some point.

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