Friday Field Trip

This past week we took our first field trip of the school year. I try to plan as many educational fun places to visit as we can fit in each year. That usually ends up not being too many. This place was pretty neat though. We visited every kids dream tree house. This place was built by the Tree House Masters from Animal Planet and will be featured on one of their episodes in January 2017.    

This tree house is used for educational children's classes at the nature preserve. It's also open to the public though to tour and play in when classes aren't being held. There's a huge ramp leading up to the tree house so it's even wheel chair and stroller accessible ( no climbing ladders to get into this tree house.) While the house itself seems to be held up by a large platform reaching the ground, it was build on top of two tree's, making it a genuine real tree house.

We had a fun day though. We went with Grandma and the girl's aunt and baby cousin. This wasn't a typical tree house. The inside was set up with a wooden table and chairs, benches built around the perimeter of the room with cusions, chalk boards, kids games,real windows, sky lights, a balcony off the back and even a ceiling fan!

We spent a little bit of time playing checkers with real pine cones, acorns, and nuts.

I loved that both of the trees that the house is built on actually come up through the middle of the tree house floor, so that there are real trees inside.

I just had to throw in a picture of my adorably handsome nephew in front of the tree here! I think he had a good time too, maybe he should come along on all of our field trips.


After spending some time inside the tree house the kids played for a while outside underneath the tree house running around and racing while mom took some pictures. There were also tree stumps outside that had been turned into Tic-Tac-Toe game boards, so we played with those for a bit too.

After our time at the tree house we went on a nature walk though the woods and hiking trails. That was pretty fun except Baby Bear fell down and skinned her knee, but nothing a few kisses (and ice-cream) couldn't make better. We found an enormous hollow tree stump, walked on a scary wobbly bridge, and found giant leaves the size of Baby Bears head. I think the coolest discovery we made was this deer track in the dirt, too bad we didn't get to see the deer that made it. That would have been really neat.

 

We had a fun day though. After our time at the nature preserve we went to lunch and enjoyed spending time with family. I wish we could spend every Friday taking field trips, it beats staying home on school days! I have a few more field trip ideas already in mind for this school year. Every year I say my goal is to go on more field trips and have more real life experiences for the girls. I'm hoping that this year I actually make that a reality!