Looking to go somewhere fun and educational with your family and some homeschool friends?  You don’t have to leave the Santa Clarita Valley at all.  Organizing a fieldtrip to one of the places on my list in my next article isn’t hard and I have done almost all of them in my 10 years of homeschooling in this valley.  It’s just a few phone calls or emails away.  But first, a few general ideas for setting up a fieldtrip.

How to set up a fieldtrip:

• Determine where you want to go and what you want your children to learn
• Determine which age groups will be present
•  Pick a few possible dates and times for the trip
• Make sure how much you are willing to pay for the trip.
• Give the venue a call and see if they are available at any of the times you can do it. Sometimes you can even do this process via email.  Tell them what you would like or find out what they normally do for a fieldtrip.  Make sure to find out the cost.  I love organizing things via email, because I can do that any time of day or night and since I’m a night owl, I send emails at the oddest of hours.  If the venue has a website, scroll down to the bottom of the site where you will usually find a “Contact us” link and they might have an email address there too as well as their phone no. of course.
•  Once you have the date & time set, you can invite some friends or just show up with your family.  (Some fieldtrips require a minimum amount of participants and it takes a few more calls/emails to get enough participants).

Important tips:

Homeschoolers usually have very busy schedules and forget about things like fieldtrips that are out of the ordinary, so send a few reminders.

Also, make it clear to the participants what the expectations are, e.g. if there is a minimum required, make sure they know that they can’t cancel the day of or just not show up.  People usually do well when they know exactly what is expected of them, but in my experience I have found many homeschoolers thinking of fieldtrips as an optional thing and so they might just not show up if they got too busy and then it reflects really badly on homeschoolers as a whole, being flaky and not dependable.

Watch out for my next article for some local fieldtrip ideas.