A Multi-Generational Field Trip
Yesterday Ray and I enjoyed a homeschool field trip with our daughter Mary Evelyn and her children.
As I mentioned recently, we live fairly close to the Hermitage, home of President Andrew Jackson. Mary Evelyn chose January 8 for the field trip because it is the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans and entrance fees to the beautiful Hermitage grounds are free each year on that anniversary.
My parents enjoyed going on field trips with us and our children. Now Ray and I enjoy going on them with our grandchildren. Perhaps some of our experiences yesterday will spark some ideas for your own multi-generational field trips. I hope you can do some with your children’s grandparents, but if not, you might find another older person to take along some time. While we were homeschooling, our children enjoyed field trips with our older friends. Once a friend we had come to love in Illinois came to visit us in Tennessee. We went to a Mennonite community with her and watched them making sorghum. Another time we went on a train ride in coal country with the senior Christians group from our church.
Our family was close to Ray Kinslow, an extremely interesting elderly gentleman in our congregation. Brother Ray wanted very much for us to go with him to see the beautiful waterfall at Cumberland Falls State Resort Park in Kentucky. We made that trip, and I cherish a picture of our son John standing with him on the overlook platform.
Mary Evelyn remembered Ray reading several historical novels set in Tennessee while we were homeschooling. The author, Alfred Leland Crabb, was one of my father’s favorite authors, and our family enjoyed him, too. Yesterday, while Ray sat in the front seat beside Mary Evelyn as she drove their van to the Hermitage, she asked him to read aloud for a while from Crabb’s Home to the Hermitage.
I rode in the very back seat between grandsons ages seven and ten. The ten-year-old showed me the notebook where he keeps poems that he has written over the last several years and read some of them aloud to me. I enjoyed hearing his brother encourage him about his poetry.
It is worth keeping up with museum opportunities in your area, because free museum days are a treasure trove for homeschooling families. These are the free activities we enjoyed at the Hermitage yesterday:
- We watched an artistic and informative 17-minute film about the life of President Jackson.
- We caught a few minutes of a reenactor giving one of Jackson’s speeches from the balcony of the mansion.
- We attended the Wreath-Laying Ceremony in the family cemetery. We watched the presentation of the colors by a Tennessee Army National Guard color guard.
This is Rachel’s Tomb, which Jackson had built
to honor his deeply beloved wife after she died
between the day he was elected and the day
he was inaugurated as America’s seventh president.
After Jackson left the presidency,
he visited her tomb every day.
- We sang the National Anthem led by a National Guardsman sergeant. We prayed with a lieutenant colonel, who serves as a National Guard chaplain, as he led the invocation. We listened to remarks by the Tennessee president of the United States Daughters of 1812 and heard the keynote address by the retired brigadier general of the Tennessee National Guard. We watched as wreaths were laid at the graves of President Jackson and his wife Rachel; listened to a moving rendition of Taps, played by another guardsman; and watched as the color guard retired the colors.
- We went inside a log cabin that housed the Jackson’s enslaved cook, Old Hannah.
- We went inside the log cabin where Andrew and Rachel Jackson lived before building the mansion.
- We contented ourselves with seeing only the outside of the mansion during this trip because on the grounds admission is free on the anniversary of the Battle.
- We made free tin punch ornaments in the building that housed kids activities.
- We saw artifacts in the museum, such as President Jackson’s ring, glasses, and walking cane; Mrs. Jackson’s white veil; and the Jackson’s carriage and their silver spoons, made in Nashville and monogramed with a J.
On the way home, our twelve-year-old granddaughter and I swapped seats. This time I sat in the middle seat between grandsons, ages five and two. While the two-year-old napped, the five-year-old and I enjoyed riddles, and he asked me to continue my ongoing Humpty Dumpty story I have been making up during car rides since before our granddaughter was his age. Meanwhile I enjoyed listening to the pretty songs she and her two brothers were singing in the back.
As Christopher Robin said, “We had a grand day out.” And to make it even more wonderful, it was all free.
Classes at co-op and tutorials and sitting with the books at the kitchen table can all be part of an excellent homeschooling experience for children. Multi-generational field trips can be, too, and they can be an excellent time to teach in the style of Deuteronomy 11:
You shall therefore impress these words of mine
on your heart and on your soul;
and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand,
and they shall be as frontals on your forehead.
You shall teach them to your sons,
talking of them when you sit in your house
and when you walk along the road
and when you lie down and when you rise up.
Deuteronomy 11:18-19