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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When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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