Kudos to all you teachers out there who are constantly carrying out a unit study. But when you don't know if the Daddy will authorize an attempt at empty seats on a plane (because he works at the airline) it's hard to plan ahead for the unit study opportunity. Most often, our field trips don't relate specifically to what we are studying in history or science. With exception, our trip last month to Gettysburg National Park came just as we finished our studies and reading about the United States Civil War, but the trip to San Jose, Costa Rice this month was an unscheduled review of HABITATS (as well as a visit to our church's international workers here).
I seem to recall from my professors in teacher's college that we, as teachers, must repeat something three times before a student will process it (even to the smallest degree) - or maybe that was in church from one of our pastor educators. Either way, we've completed physical geography lessons from Hands of a Child regarding the (cloud) Rain-forest Habitat and visited the big island of Hawaii once to see the Hilo side where everything is lush and forested in like manner. But we never expected to take a day trip to the La Paz Waterfall site north of San Jose on a perfect October morning with the guide extraordinaire.
We saw brilliant foliage, indigenous animals and waterfalls. This trip made an impression on my kids so that if given the choice again, they would go to the mountains before trekking to the beaches on either side of the isthmus between the Americas. And maybe they will visit more sites in the future to make reference to their habitat studies, but that only reinforces how important it was to be intentional and make the effort to teach them nature study no matter what habitat they found themselves (irregardless of our unit study status).
