Summer Field Trips

If your child is home for the summer, try mini field trips to common spots such as a library, bookstore, farmers market, hardware store, lumber yard, or other places you might run normal errands.

The point of the trip is several-fold. You can work on how one should behave, if you have had problems with your child not behaving appropriately for the venue. If it easier to do this on a dedicated field trip, and not when you are running errands on a deadline.

You can also tell your child that you have a certain amount of time to spend at whatever destination you choose, and you can also let your child choose the place. If you are working with children who are interested in, say, working with nuts and bolts, you can let him or her select a few pairs to work with at home when you visit the hardware store.

Coordinating with another parent or two so you can put together a group of three or four children can make the field trip a more social experience. Try mixing age groups to get a three-year range of ages, so older children can learn how to help younger children, and the younger ones can enjoy following the older children instead of their parents. This is one important part of a traditional Montessori classroom that is nice to replicate whenever possible.