How Including Experts Can Make a Field Trip Even More Special
One thing that I’ve noticed about myself with my kids is that I like to pretend that I know everything. And when they were young enough that their questions stuck to the basics, it was pretty easy to do. However, the more we travel, the more my kids learn. At this point, I think we’ve all figured out: I do not know it all, no matter how much I like to pretend.
Fortunately, there are a variety of different experts in all sorts of places, just waiting to answer my kids’ hardest questions! Whether it’s a professional scientist in the field, a tour guide for hire, or a diehard enthusiast that wants to share their passion with the world, including experts in your field trips can be an excellent way to take things to the next level!
Hiring Guides and Teachers
One of the easiest ways to include experts in your family’s next field trip is simply to hire one.
Even though there are some very stark differences in what they do, I consider field guides, tour guides, and teachers to all fall under the category of “experts-for-hire”. Essentially, These are experts who will trade their hard-won knowledge for a fee. Since they are professionals, they will typically have credentials that prove that they know their stuff.
Depending on the kind of experience you want, hiring an expert to show you around or teach you a skill can make for a super fun field trip that your kids will be talking about for weeks!
Here’s a quick run-down of each of the types of field trip experts that you can hire and what sets them apart from each other.
Field Guides
“Field Guides” is the term I use for experts in the field that you hire to get access to new places or to keep you safe during your explorations. A great example of a place where we hired a field guide was my family’s recent trip to Pacaya Volcano in Guatemala.
We couldn’t even get onto the slopes of the volcano without first hiring a certified guide. That could seem like an unwanted hassle to some, but ultimately we were glad to have him! Not only did he share his knowledge of the volcano with us by helping us to roast marshmallows over a hot spot caused by a lava flow, but he also worked to make sure our family stayed safe when the volcano decided to be a bit temperamental.
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Tour Guides
Tour Guides are the experts that you hire because you want to know about a specific place or set of places. Tour guides will typically specialize in a very narrow set of locations. That means that for those places, they will know pretty much everything worth knowing, including a lot of interesting things that you might not be able to find out about otherwise. Personally, I think hiring a tour guide is a great decision for families with slightly older kids since they really help bring out the interesting bits, but oftentimes they’ll miss the mark with younger kids. In the end, it depends greatly on what your family is looking for.
I’ve written an entire Guide to Guides that explains a lot of the pros and cons of hiring a tour guide. If you’re debating whether or not to get a tour guide, it’s a great resource.
Note: While most major tourist locations will have plenty of tour guides to hire at the door, it can also be really helpful to hire someone ahead of time. At some locations, they can even help you get through lines more quickly so you get to see more during your trip!
Teachers
At first glance, teachers don’t seem to fit in this category, but adding a thematically appropriate class onto your field trip can take do a lot for keeping your kids engaged. Whereas Field Guides and Tour Guides both teach about locations, Teachers usually get hired to teach a specific skill.
One of my favorite examples of hiring teachers for a field trip is taking cooking lessons. It is my opinion that looking at a culture’s food is one of the best ways to learn about an area since cuisine touches on so many different parts of culture.
Some other interesting skills that you can learn on a trip include mushroom foraging, star gazing, art styles, beginner’s language courses, horse riding, and more!
Asking Scientists, Historians, and Rangers
Unlike guides and teachers, scientists, historians, and rangers aren’t typically people that you would hire out. However, they often will know the ins and outs of their subjects even better than the typical tour guide because they‘re the ones making the newest discoveries! They are researchers.
Unlike hiring a tour guide, you can’t always be certain of finding a researcher during your field trip. If you do happen across a researcher, it is well worth your time to strike up a conversation!
Chatting with local scientists has led to some of the most amazing experiences for my kids. One of my favorites was getting to go into the fossil prep lab at the Perot Museum in Dallas for a conversation with a real Paleontologist. She helped us to identify some of the fossils we had found during our recent fossil hunt, and we got to see some of the bones that she was working on as well!
Another time, we had the chance to get up close to some prairie dogs, under the supervision of a crew from the United States Geological Survey. They were checking the local population for fleas to prevent the possibility of plague infecting them. My kids even got to pet a prairie dog and help reset one of the traps!
These are experiences that you’re not likely to find on a tour schedule, but, if you’re lucky enough to find them, they make some amazing memories. Plus, since these are real scientists doing real jobs, chatting with them about their work is a wonderful opportunity to show your kids jobs that a lot of people don’t even know exist!
Rangers
In my experience, park rangers don’t get half the credit they deserve for being experts in their fields. A lot of people tend to think of them as park police officers, who are there to make sure people behave. Or maybe to ask for directions, if you get lost. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that there are a lot of rangers whose main job is research and education!
For instance, when we were in Yosemite, we had the opportunity to attend a lecture on peregrine falcons. Chatting with the ranger afterward, we found out that his main jobs at the park were studying the falcons and educating the public. Since then we’ve met rangers who study, bats, fossils, cave formations, and more!
Not every ranger is a scientist, but almost every ranger we’ve talked with has had a story worth hearing.
Book and Video Resources
The last way that we have included experts in our field trips is through thematic resources that go along with the trip. This could be as simple as streaming a documentary, or as complex as assigning your kids a full-on research project. We don’t do this in the middle of a trip, but it’s a good fit both leading up to it or once you’ve returned home.
Looking through resources before the trip is great for increasing kids’ engagement during the trip itself. It gives them context for everything that they’re going to see and helps them to know what to look for once they’re there.
Likewise, exploring resources after the fact means getting to relive the fun parts of the trip. This can help kids get a greater sense of accomplishment as they see places they’ve visited appearing in books or on TV.
Either way, it works to increase kids’ general knowledge surrounding your trip destination and helps them to feel good about the places they’ve been.
Personally, including experts in our family field trips is one of my favorite ways of getting the kids excited about the places we see. Not only can it lead to some amazing experiences, but it also gives me space to not know everything during our trips. Field trips are about helping the kids to learn, but I definitely like getting to learn, too! By taking a back seat during our field trips and letting the experts talk about the things they know best, we can get the best of both worlds.
Looking for a great way to
plan your next Field Trip?
My new Field Trip Planner for Parents is designed to help with the hard work of planning a family field trip, from beginning to end. It has room for brainstorming activities, creating itineraries, thinking about questions to ask, and even a place for taping in your entrance tickets or other mementos!
