Field Trip Fridays Adventure

Due to me having four kids to teach this year, I’ve had to become mighty creative in how I keep them encouraged and excited about learning. I am not ashamed to admit that I’m using a bit of bribery to keep them on track. I started the concept of Field Trip Fridays. This allows us the ability to take Friday’s OFF and go somewhere fun within the state somewhere. The past two Fridays has been a blast.

Before they can go anywhere:

• Their grades have to be good (or they get left behind!)
• They have to have a good attitude throughout the week.
• They also have to do what is expected of them throughout the week within the household they live in.

Our First Field Trip Friday

The first week I wasn’t fully prepared with a full fun day of events, but we still had a lot of fun exploring a new park just outside of Summerville, SC. It’s a park called Gahagan Park.

I was impressed with this park’s playground! The kids had a blast too! It is an enormous playground compared to what I’m used to seeing. It’s in a nice shady section and they have plenty of seating available for parents too.

They created little things to enhance the children’s imaginations. There were little old box telephones throughout the play area. There was a ship and tree drawings, and castle like settings. The creators of this park know how to keep kids engaged and entertained for hours on end.

Then we hit the trails closest to the park too. We could have traveled more had we had more time.

Our Second Field Trip Friday

This time we went in the opposite direction and went to my college stomping grounds. We headed to the beautiful Aiken, SC. I showed them where I went to college at USC-Aiken and the general area of where I lived.

Hitchcock Woods

We walked through Hitchcock Woods. I forgot out intense those trails are to walk on. We got to see some horses in the pastures along the trails. We also got to see some riders on their horses.

Of course, my kids’ favorite aspect was collecting BIG HUGE GORGEOUS pine cones. Which they came home and did a craft with them .  I called Del and told him that we got lost in the woods and he laughed at me. We seriously could have easily gotten lost in the beauty of it all. Now we’re all eager to go back there again.

Hopeland Gardens

This was a bit of a disappointment for us because we found the middle right away due to where we parked. We didn’t stay here long at all.

Aiken County Historical Museum

I was unexpectedly surprised that this ended up being the place that we spent most of our time at. Rebecca and Delbert enjoyed examining everything in the museum. They learned a lot about our SC history and other types of history. Be sure to check out our pictures. (I’m not sharing everything we got to see.) Considering this is such small house I didn’t expect to see so many wonderful things here, but it’s jammed packed from top to bottom. It even had a kids’ room filled with old time toys for them to play with.

Hole-in-One Putt-Putt

I finally got to take the kids to play putt-putt. The putt-putt courses in Myrtle Beach are still a lot better, but considering how we ended up playing the game this was the perfect course for starting out on. We DID NOT follow ANY of the putt-putt rules AT.ALL!! However, we did make memories and have a good time. That was really all I cared about doing. By the time we got to go play, it was really hot and I was ready to call it a day, but I promised them we’d play a game. We made it fairly quickly, but jammed with lots of memories.

First game of Putt-Putt!! Zeva had a blast.

A photo posted by Crystal (@crystal_green521) on Sep 7, 2015 at 1:34pm PDT

 

Our Field Trip Fridays are something we’re looking forward to doing. I have no clue where we’re going to end up next Friday. (We didn’t go anywhere last Friday because Del had his outpatient surgery.)

Did you enjoy seeing these pictures from our trips? Would you like to see more?