National Parks and Geocaching

School On The Road

We decided to take a longer trip for Thanksgiving. I planned to make the most of it and printed out tons of activities for the kids to do. I didn't bring the math books, but I did bring some mapping activities, word puzzles, writing assignments and more. Long story short, we didn't do most of it. We were too busy doing other

activities. So, I'm not sure how other families study "on th

e road" but it didn't seem to work too well for our family. Maybe our trip was too short (two weeks) to find time for worksheets. We had an activity planned for almost every day, so by the time bedtime rolled around, we were all exhausted. We did look at the maps, to see where we were driving each day, but the rest of our school work grew cobwebs.

School Happens Everywhere

However, part of our new found thinking is that school happens everywhere, not just in books. When we knew we were going to visit Muir Woods, near San Francisco, my husband looked on line and found a great activity for the kids to do while we were there. We printed the pdf Redwood Discovery a Quest at Muir Woods at our hotel and armed each kid with a pencil. When we arrived at Muir Woods, the ranger station had a "junior ranger" program already there. If we hadn't had our quest, I think we would have done their program. It's great to know that there are activities at national monuments to keep kids involved and interested. The junior ranger program was similar to our quest, it asked kids to find things along the way. However, you then turned in your sheets, and later, they send you a junior ranger patch. The quest, on the other hand, gave you a sticker at the end (if you figured out all the clues to be able to open the lock). It was nice to have immediate gratification for our hard work.

Geocaching is World Wide

Geocaching, a GPS based treasure hunt, has been a great discovery for our family as well. Whenever we are away from home (or even at home), and in need of something to do outside, we think of Geocaching. There are thousands of little treasures hidden all over. On this trip, we found ourselves in Golden Gate Park. As we explored the trail system in the park, we discovered three geocaches in 30 minutes!