Annual trip to the War Memorial (auditorium) to hear the symphony. “Peter and the Wolf”, just like Peppermint Patty and Marcy used to sit through! In senior year they bussed us to the artsy movie theater to see Romeo and Juliette but we had to get a signed permission slip because of a “10 second nude scene involving a married couple”:rolleyes::rolleyes: - my mom had a great time joking that no, she didn’t think I should be going to see a nude scene, ha-ha, MOM, just sign the slip or I will! Now, of course, there’s no money for squat for the kids, they won’t be going anywhere on the public dime and will probably have to hitchhike to school when there are no more buses…Oh, one other odd thing I can mention, in high school a small group of students arranged their OWN field trip to a manufacturing plant. Yes, without asking or consulting any authority, they arranged a tour of this factory. I forgot how they got there (parents drove?), but it was all arranged, don’t know how or why , during school hours. The principal - the principal! - found out at the last minute, had to drop everything and go along as a chaperone. And was he FURIOUS! He ripped these kids new assholes when they got back, as you can well imagine.
I was absent for the day of the Eckrich Bologna Plant fieldtrip. I was really sick, not just an excuse to bow out- kinda wish I could have gone these many years later.
Mostly I went to school in East Lansing, Michigan, but we were in Mexico City the year I was in 5th grade.
In East Lansing, I remember going to the museum at MSU and, in 7th grade, to Greenfield Village. Seems like we must have gone other places, too, but I’ve forgotten them. Huh. The MSU museum was founded in 1857, which is only 2 years after the university was founded.
In Mexico City, we went to the National Museum of Anthropology several times; it’s still one of my all-time favorite museums. I think we also went to the Museo del Caracol, although I don’t believe it was called that at the time. If you visit Mexico City, Chapultepec Park is a must. It has a bunch of museums (10 or so), a zoo, a botanical garden (which, oddly, I’ve never visited), a couple of small lakes, an amusement park, and a castle. Here’s another link with info. The children’s museum has an awesome planetarium; shows are all in Spanish, so if you’re not fluent, it might not be worth the money for you. It’s a really fun museum, even if you’re not a kid. I’m sure we would have had a field trip there too if it had existed when I was little.
It’s interesting to read all the different types of trips people took in school.
Went to a private Christian school in Indianapolis in the 70s and 80s…
A Coca-Cola bottling plant (now closed).
A McDonalds (toured the back room and spent some time in the walk-in freezer… oddly fun as a kid). Years later, when I worked at a Hardee’s, we hosted a few field trips, too. Little did I know that my school was preparing me for my (temporary) future.
Craig Park, our go-to for all-day park days, located in another county… which was weird since the school was less than a block away from the much larger and more diverse Garfield Park (though we did tour the greenhouses at Garfield a few times).
Adrian Orchards, an old-timey apple orchard that uses antique machinery in an antique barn to make cider and process apples.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, but we had to avoid the dinosaur exhibits, since it contradicted the school’s teachings.
Indiana State Museum.
Conner Prairie “interactive history” museum, which attempts to recreate an 1800’s rural community.
Hooks Drugstore Museum, within the Indiana State Fairgrounds. I guess we did other stuff at the fairgrounds, too, but I only remember the museum.
Benjamin Harrison Home, a former residence of former president Harrison turned into a museum… usually combined with a trip to…
…the James Whitcomb Riley Home, another house-turned-museum.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum, which was always absurdly interesting to me despite not caring about racing.
The old location of the Indianapolis International Airport, where we got locked in a jail cell for fun.
The school also dragged us around for good-ol’ activism; attending political rallies, attending conferences on unregistered churches, protesting adult bookstores and Planned Parenthood clinics. My mom pulled me out of the school because attending the protests became a requirement, though I believe she was more upset at lost classroom time than she was at the content of the protest.
Nothing really out of the ordinary, except one real WTF?!
In fourth grade we went to a wastewater treatment plant. Now, what on earth would interest a bunch of 10-year-olds about that?
We saw the early 90s equivalent of a powerpoint, then got to walk past a bunch of tanks of sewage in various states of treatment. And yes, it smelled like shit, as you would expect.
…although in retrospect I do remember kind of being interested in the presentation and the various chemical, enzymatic and bacterial treatment stages. So I guess that stuck with me. And I ended up in a sciency/industry career, so maybe there was a point to the whole thing.
Southeastern Ohio in the 1980s and 1990s. In elementary school, we went to see Dawes Arboretum, and also the Indian mounds near Newark, Ohio. We also went to Flint Ridge, and Roscoe Village, which is a now-defunct “historical village” that had an old set of locks that were once part of the Erie Canal system. (These remained impressive to me until we moved to Seattle and I visited the Ballard locks, and then, um, not so much.)
When I was a freshman in high school, my marching band went on a trip to Disney World. Then my senior class trip was to Cedar Point. (Woo!)
One thing I remember about those school field trips is that I always felt it necessary to buy some sort of souvenir from the inevitable gift shop. But given the five bucks or so that I’d have, this usually meant some sort of medallion or other pointless thing. I don’t think I even have any of that stuff any more. I think eventually I learned that there was no point in buying any of it.
We went, probably several times, to Independence Hall, Carpenter Hall, Betsy Ross house. Almost every year, it seems in retrospect, to the Franklin Institute, the Natural History museum, and/or the Philadelphia Art Museum. Once we went somewhere (I don’t think it was the Franklin Institute) that had a paper-making exhibit that I found fascinating. We never went out of the city. Longwood Gardens would have been a great place to visit, but we didn’t.
Ditto for around Toronto in the 70’s with the addition of Canada’s Wonderland (theme park)
Also for my kids, same destinations in the 90’s.
What does building missions mean? Like building a replica of a religious mission?
Ditto for me in the 70s and 80s, growing up in Whitby, Ontario. (Before grade three, we lived in Peterborough, Ontario, but I don’t remember going on any field trips then.)
I also remember going to see the steel mills in Hamilton. That was impressive. The school pus passed not too near a railcar filled with molten steel; waves of heat came through the bus windows and we could see that the car was glowing faint red in the shadows.
Another thing we went to see was Sainte Marie among the Hurons. I don’t remember much about this except that it was in winter, it was a long way away, it was cold, and the food made me throw up.
And, of course, in the summer after Grade 6 we went to camp. It was at Camp Samac just north of Oshawa, Ontario. (It’s probably a suburb now.) I don’t remember that much about it either, except that the food made me throw up.
In high school there weren’t many ‘field trips’ as such… it was more like voluntary trips for which we had to pay. One year they went to England, another year to Cuba, etc. Not being particularly wealthy, my parents couldn;t afford to send me on these trips, so I felt left out.
There was the ‘see what your future university is like!’ trip in the spring of Grade 13, though. I went to Waterloo University and got to write a program on the punch card machines. When I got there the following September, they were gone.
Yes. Mine was the Mission of San Juan Capistrano. It was insanely detailed, and built mostly by my mother and grandmother.
I think my public school was too cheap to send us on many field trips. We were expected to visit a mission on our own time. Luckily I had parents who were gung-ho about education and they made sure to take both my sister and I to our respective missions (she did San Carmel) and get the full tour.
I know for sure my school visited the tide pools at Dana Point and the Cabrillo aquarium in San Pedro, but I don’t really remember any other field trips. My daycare, on the other hand, took us to a farm, the Getty Villa, the Los Angeles Children’s Museum, Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, Sea World, the zoo, and pretty much any place worth of a child’s attention in Southern California.
I always wished I’d had one like my mother’s. She said when she was a high-school student in rural northwestern Arkansas, they took a class trip to New York City. That would have been circa 1950 and must have been exciting.
Yep. Something like it seems to be in a lot of state’s 4th grade curriculum. California builds missions (mine was out of sugar cubes). My wife is from Boston, and she made a replica of the Old North Church.
Southern Kern County, CA, in the 1960’s for me! I can remember going to a turkey ranch, a commercial bakery, the old Griffith Park zoo, and taking the train from Mojave to Bakersfield, going through the Tehachapi Loop. I think we must also have gone to San Fernando Mission also. ISTR doing the Mission study in 3rd grade, not 4th, and I’m pretty sure we had to build a mission also. There were supposed to be a field trip per year, with the best one, an overnight trip to Catalina Island in 8th grade, but they stopped doing them before I reached junior high. I think that is really a shame.
2nd Grade. We went to the cat-house.
Okay, it was the cat house at the Cincinnatti Zoo. I still remember how neurotic the cats were and how the smell could knock you off your feet.
My mother was a girl scout leader and she organized field trips for the troop. She seemed to have an interest in teaching us about business, because we went to the peanut butter factory, Mickey D’s, a candy store (fun–we got loads of free candy), and the coca cola bottling plant. I vaguely recall the guy at the coca cola plant saying there were only a few people in the world who knew the formula for coke and they were never in the same city at the same time.
It was a great relief to me to learn that there were security measures to prevent the coca cola formula from falling into the hands of terrorists.
I don’t remember any field trips while in elementary school in the '60s. In junior high we went to see the movies a couple of times, “Sounder” and “1776.” In high school several English class trips to see performances by the Trinity Square Repertory Company in Providence and a few trips to see the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall with the band.
Alice Miner Museum
Fort Ticonderoga
The Granby Zoo
The Shelburne Museum
Upper Canada Village
We went to the original Yager Museum, which has since closed.
Oh, I forgot one. We went to the place where King Co’s water was readied for consumption (About 1958) We went to the Cedar river treatment facility. It was a big stone building that the river ran through. Inside was a gigantic paddle wheel of screens, that took out the leaves, then the water rand down a two foot water fall into I big pipe, where a guy opened a port and poured in one gallon of Clorex bleach. He said we were lucky to see it, because they did that only once a month. That was the extent of water treatment in the greater Seattle area until well into the '70s.
The water was so pure that the early dialysis machines (invented at the University of Washington) used tap water, rather than distilled.
We did this too, in third or fourth grade.
In kindergarten we took a walking field trip to the local fire station.
The Zoo
We walked to the local jail, around middle school, and there were other local trips; to the grocery store, a greenhouse, an apple orchard, etc.
The Rochester Museum and Science Center
An Aquarium
A movie theater - we saw Mr. Holland’s Opus.
Niagara Falls - my group stayed in the mall the whole time, so we didn’t see the Falls, themselves. Thinking back, I’m not sure why the school allowed that.
A minor league baseball game (the Buffalo Bisons)
An actual field (to watch a solar eclipse, and do some nature related things that I don’t remember)