Adventure Trip to Washington, DC!
This year’s 7th-8th grade class trip was a 4-day visit to our nation’s capital. Eleven of us (nine kids and two teacher chaperones) made the long drive on Monday, spent two very busy days exploring museums and sites around D.C., and then headed home on Thursday. We rode together, ate our meals together, walked miles and miles together, wandered through exhibits together, and had a great time relaxing in our Airbnb in downtown Washington, D.C., together. Fortunately, we all get along pretty well!
We obviously could not even begin to see everything D.C. had to offer in such a short period of time. So instead of going on the typical school trip to Washington, where we drive past every monument and stop briefly in every museum, we decided to concentrate on exploring just a few places. Our approach to these trips is not to pack in as many educational experiences as possible, but instead to show our students that those educational experiences can be a fun part of travel.
Our primary goal is to supplement our current history topics of study at school with real experiences. This year, we are studying the United States in the 1800s, a fascinating era that is important to address fully with kids because of the mistakes made in the way that we, as a nation, treated huge numbers of people. Learning about the culture of an entire group of people is difficult to achieve through books alone, so we took full advantage of the opportunity to see the world of Native and African Americans through the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Both museums gave our students a little more perspective on what we’ve been reading in class and hopefully inspired them to want to learn more.
We did find time to walk by some of the more significant government buildings in Washington, D.C.!
We also spent a morning in Ford’s Theater, where we learned A LOT about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, wandered around the Natural History Museum, and had a great time at the International Spy Museum. We walked through the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Art, went out for Ethiopian and Thai and gelato, and soaked in the numerous cultures that surrounded us in the city. It was an exhausting few days, but so worth it for the memories that were made.
