Staying Home? Check out these Virtual Field Trips

While so many kids are home as a result of the covid-19 outbreak, lots of people are pulling together resources and sharing information to help us keep our kids entertained and learning at home.

One fun thing to do while kids are home is to do a virtual field trip daily. These might tie into other activities of the day or just be something fun to do in downtime.

Google Earth has virtual tours of 33 national parks you can look through. The girl and I went to Acadia National Park in Maine (where husband and I went on our honeymoon) yesterday.

Google also has a collection of the virtual collections of thousands of art museums from around the world. Visit the National Portrait Gallery in DC, the Munch Museum in Oslo, the British Museum and many, many more.

This Google Doc from Mrs. Fahrney has a nice collection of field trips including the San Diego Zoo and Boston’s Children’s Museum.

Do you know of more fun field trips or virtual tours out there? I’d love to add to this list.

[Photo via Totally the Bomb.]

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With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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