A favorite summer homeschool activity for many families is camping and hiking–and Virginia is blessed with glorious outdoor adventure opportunities. Make them your favorites with hands-on, fun, educational activities. You can teach outdoor survival skills, logic, and more, without ever setting foot in a classroom. Even if you don’t homeschool year-round, you can make the great outdoors your classroom for your summer homeschool!
Summer Homeschool Adventures
Learn how to use a compass to navigate in the wilderness, orient a map, take and plot your bearings, and more, with Outdoors Generations’ “Ultimate Guide to Navigation.”
Put those compass skills to use by taking a geocaching field trip. A combination hike and treasure hunt, geocaching incorporates mapping skills, geography, art, science, math, and more into one fun outing. Not familiar with it? Get the basics of geocaching with kids here.
Put these 10 hiking tips from Wilderness.org to the test and make your hiking trip an activity that the whole family will love. Learn how to stay safe, plan, pack, and dress for all of your wilderness adventures.
A fun thing to do while out in nature is to identify animal tracks. You can use the Animal Tracks Identification Chart from the Old Farmer’s Almanac.
This eye-spy nature scavenger hunt is a great alternative to traditional scavenger hunts that generally involve collecting specific items. You can teach your children to care for and respect the nature and wildlife they encounter by documenting it with a camera or sketchbook and leaving it right where it is! (This is especially important in national parks where it is often illegal to remove plants or wildlife from the park.)
Megan Mora Fuentes
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