Favorite or most memorable field trip in grade school?

[sl8]

Plus approximate timeframe, if you don't mind.

For me, it was a visit to the natural history museum in Albany, NY. It was sometime around 1970.

The best way I can describe it is to say, if you offer a 10 (?) year old boy a choice between a day in class or a trip to see a friggin' mastodon, it's best not to stand in the path to the mastodon.

How about you?

[AJT]

1. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

[mopinko]

33. did you go in the coal mine?

that's a cool one.
chicago is a great open air classroom.

[AJT]

34. The coal mine and the uboat. I really liked the AT&T sound wave display.

I haven't been there since 1969 or so. I hope they've kept the place up. Chicago has some incredible museums, like the Field Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as the Adler Planetarium and the Shed aquarium. It's a great place to take a kid for a long weekend.

[Luciferous]

46. That was always my favorite as well! I took the kiddo there last year and it was still awesome,

but very busy because we went around Christmas.

[rzemanfl]

57. +1. Middle 1950's. n/t

[likesmountains 52]

2. The Denver Symphony...probably 1962 or so. I remeber hearing this...

[Chemisse]

3. 1966 - when I was in 6th grade - a field trip to see a computer!

It was large - the size of a typical bathroom - and quite impressive, with flashing lights and humming sounds.

I didn't really know what it all meant, and I sure could never have fathomed what it would come to mean in our lives, but it made a big impression on me.

[applegrove]

4. There was a farm my school board ran. We went there year after year. We

learnt how to make old time candles and saw inside a live bee hive. One time our bus was late. We were freezing. The teacher put us into the top floor of an old house that had no heating and had us sing and move about to stay warm. It seemed like hours before our bus ride came.

[WestLosAngelesGal]

5. The McCormick Spice Company in Baltimore, MD

Honestly, it was the best-smelling and best-tasting field trip ever. I still think about it, decades later. We got to do taste tests of a BBQ sauce on hot dogs and toured the factory and learned about all of history of the spices and where they came from and how they were grown, shipping and cleaning the spices, packaging them and sending them to stores, etc. It was fabulous to my second-grade mind.

[csziggy]

7. That would be totally cool for me even today as an old woman!

I'm a little jealous.

Welcome to DU!

[ms liberty]

29. Okay, that sounds awesome! n/t

[csziggy]

6. In my small hometown the only field trips were to local places

We got to go to the public library and apply for a library card - that was sort of boring since I'd had one since I was four and the librarian knew me by name. We also got to go to the bank where one of the tellers explained how to open a savings account and what a checking account was for. It must have been before we learned multiplication because she started to tell us about earning interest, but the teacher said that was too complicated for the kids.

They never even took us to the Bone Valley Museum just out of town - there was a frigging mastodon there!

[sl8]

10. Oh, you was robbed. Friggin' mastodons are NOT overrated. But, you seem to have recovered OK.

[csziggy]

18. Out of school I got to go to cool places

We lived in Bone Valley, the Central Florida phosphate area. There is a Phosphate Museum (http://www.mulberryphosphatemuseum.org/home.html) that used to have a mastodon in it - when they moved it, the mastodon went to Gainesville. Both my dad and granddad were phosphate mining engineers. Granddad would pay the workers to save fossils and stuff that showed up when the phosphate was screened - he had sharks teeth eight inches across and we recently found a letter from the Chicago Museum of Natural History thanking him for a contribution of a dugong bone.

My sister has a collection of mammoth and mastodon fossils, and is a major amateur fossil hunter. A few years back she had a new species of Smilodon named for her (Rhizosmilodon fitae), so I still get to see cool stuff now.

In a couple of weeks, when our cruise ship stops in New York, we're going to see the T rex exhibit with fuzzy baby T rexes

https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/t-rex-the-ultimate-predator


While in the UK we plan to do some fossil hunting to get something for my sister. I'm hoping for an ammonite, but will be happy to find anything at all.

[Skittles]

8. Madame Tussauds and the Planetarium were always my favorite

I hated, HATED Stonehenge

[sl8]

13. In England, right?

My first trip to a planetarium blew my mind. Still does, when I think of it.

What's the problem with Stonehenge?

On edit:
I do know where Stonehenge is. Were the other two in England, also?

[Skittles]

15. yes

it took a long time to get to Stonehenge and I don't travel well, and it was a pile of rocks in the middle of nowhere

Madam Tussauds is a wax museum, been there forever....the planetarium used to be next to it

[mr_lebowski]

9. Mrs Gillfillan's class, Sleepy Hollow Elementary, Orinda, CA, 1976-77

We had overnight field trips where the class got to spend the night on the C.A. Thayer, moored at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, and at Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

In both cases everyone drew straws for their duties/ranks like 'galley' or 'sentry', and 'sailor' or 'corporal', etc. Both trips were a blast. Esp. being a Sentry cause you got stay up at weird hours of the night and horse around with a couple friends, 'guarding the fort', that kinda thing.

[The Figment]

11. I don't know if this quite qualifys as a field trip but,

I was able to trade a full semester of English in my junior year in high school for a 26 day Hurricane Island Outward Bound course in Penobscot Bay Maine.
Today's Hurricane Island Outward Bounders have it easy! Fiberglass Sloops for sailing boats, based out of Portland Maine, modern navigation equipment, hell they have nylon sails and real spinnakers!
Back in 1974 the boats we had were 10,000 lb.Pulling Boats (think of a 1920's lifeboat) they were ketch rigged with a square main sail and a triangle jib sail,our navigation equipment consisted of a compass and a sextant, that's it!
To get to Hurricane Island one had to take a ferry to Vinelhaven Island and then get on the "SS Hurricane" a 48 foot fishing trawler converted into a Coast Guard rescue ship.
For those who are unfamiliar with Outward Bound it was started in 1940 as sea man's survival training by the British Navy in case of torpedo attack. It has morfed into a number of courses from 6 to 26 days at 20 some odd "schools" around the world, from ocean sailing and seamanship (Hurricane Island) Long Distance whitewater river and backwoods survival (North Carolina) to winter high altitude orienteering and extreme cold weather survival (Colorado) there Outward Bound Schools in Australia, South America and Europe.
Outward Bounders were and are some of the first to try and do some of the craziest things...sailing a Pulling Boat from Maine to Key West out in the Atlantic, not the Intercostal Waterway as most do...back in 1976!

Nothing in the world is like having "Bow Watch" at 2am in 25 foot waves with a 40 knot wind coming off the port bow while tacking into the wind...Think "Deadliest Catch" on a rough nite....The North Atlantic is every bit as tough as the Bering Sea.

Truly a Trip!

[captain queeg]

12. The Warther museum in ohio (woodcarving)

I think that’s the name. The guy who could carve wooden pliers in about 5 seconds. Made one for each kid. I went back there about 10 years ago and took my son. The old man had died and his son taken ever. My son was suitably impressed.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

14. The Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, NY.

4th grade so it would have been 1958. Loved it. Some forty years later on a summer trip with my two sons I took them there.

[sl8]

16. Did that have a stone giant?

I'm pretty sure I went there, but I don't know if it was a school trip or a family trip.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

17. You're thinking of the Cardiff Giant.

Yes, it was there. And is still there.

[SeattleVet]

19. Wow...so many of them!

I grew up in Mount Vernon, NY, just north of NYC, so our field trips were mostly downtown to some amazing local things, like the American Museum of Natural History, Hayden Planetarium, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Metropolitan Opera, the United Nations, a few Broadway plays (Purlie with Melba Moore was GREAT!), Con Edison, New York Times, etc. We did some trips where we headed to the north - Corning Glass Works; Museum Village in Monroe, NY; and a few others. The time ranged from grade school through high school (1959-1972).

The one that I remember the most fondly was a trip to Chinatown in NYC during Chinese New Year, probably around 1967 or 68. We ate at a pretty decent restaurant then went out to watch the Dragon parade. I stopped at a little shop and bought a few packs of (totally illegal in NYC, but easily available to any kid with a dollar) firecrackers, which I lit and tossed into the street during the parade, along wth everyone else, while the NYPD wandered around and watched. At one point I had just tossed a lit firecracker into the street, and someone across the street had also tossed one, which hit my hand just as it went off. I had two numb fingers for most of the rest of the day. Fun times!

[Brother Buzz]

20. A visit to Lou's gas station in second grade

We marched three blocks down to Lou's and watch Lou and his brother-in-law service a car. After servicing the car, Lou opened up the Coca-Cola machine and handed each of us a 7 1/2 oz bottle. After our refreshments, we went back into the service bay and watched Lou patch an inner tube and stick it back in the wheel. Then Lou handed out cans of oil, complements of Chevron Oil. Then we marched back to school just in time for lunch. It was a memorable day.

[ProudLib72]

68. Did you end up becoming a mechanic? No?

Mission accomplished...

[Brother Buzz]

70. I lived two blocks away and spent a lot of time at Lou's over the years....

You can observe a lot by watching.

[sakabatou]

21. Monterey Bay Aquarium

Marine Bio class

[TlalocW]

22. I can think of two

Both were 1st or 2nd grade, which would have been late 70s. One was more of an excursion - the class four blocks to the local store (this was a small farming town in Kansas, south of Wichita) to get the class Christmas tree, and groups took turns carrying it back. The other one was to Wichita - we visited one of the TV stations, and I remember seeing the set for a local kids show, which primarily focused on some puppet characters living in a tree. We saw the tree sitting on a concrete floor in front of the background they used (blue sky), but no stage lights were on so it was just the tree not surrounded by anything. Kind of weird visual.

TlalocW

[emmaverybo]

23. Summer school. Science program. Do not ask me why, as my hometown has a major university

with major science research and innovation going on, but we went to the sewers. Yes. They said
the trip was something to do with sanitation, which I don’t recall was even on the curriculum. Maybe it was and this adventure in it was the way to squeeze sanitation in.

They did tell those of us who had gone queasy some ways out from the sewage plant that we could stay in the bus as needed. I had no choice. It was stay on board or get very sick.

The visit to the bakery for hot crossed buns in a small town some years before, with a stop off at our teacher’s old Victorian had been much nicer. It was spring and we were all happy and those buns smelled great.

[Doreen]

24. Well, one was an actual field trip while attending

JFK in Germany. We went on a tour of a place that makes sauerkraut. I got a bunch of bags of sauerkraut.

The other was not really a field trip but a sixth grade camping trip. Miller sylvania park was closed the year my class went so we got to go to Orcas Island instead.

[JesterCS]

25. Going to COSI in Columbus, OH n/t

[rampartc]

26. the local art museum was more fun than it should have been

and several times per year we went to the "repatary theatre." I remember hamlet, streetcar named desire, and maybe a few theatre of the absurd plays maybe waiting for godot.

my favorite field trips, I guess, were less formal. skipping school to explore the city. my parents would have abused me for those.

[dewsgirl]

27. Universal Studios with my 8th grade drama class. 1991.

I have been literally hundreds of times since. But the park had just opened and this is when I first fell in love with USF.☺
Also 1985, I was in second grade and we went to our local Pizza Hut and made our own personal pan pizzas, it is still such a vivid memory. Of the seemingly tons of field trips we went on, throughout my school years we went to tons of theme/amusement park, yet that PH trip sticks out for some reason. Maybe because I preferred to go with my parents to those places and we went often. They never took me to a Pizza Hut kitchen.🙄

[mikeargo]

28. Boston Aquarium

And the top of the Prudential Building.
Sophomore year, back in 1974.

[ms liberty]

30. I have two: Cape Kennedy, and Nature's Classroom

I grew up in Tampa, and the Hillsborough County school system sent sixth graders on 2 field trips when I was in elementary school. We toured Cape Kennedy, which was an all day trip, because it took a couple of hours to get there. This was around 70-71, so the space program was still very active. It was fascinating, although I don't remember any details. What I do remember is being on my first period ever, and having to use the bathroom on the bus. That sucked, and was embarassing because at that age you think everybody knows everything, you know? In retrospect, I know every other kid had their own thing they were worried about, but at the time I was mortified.
Nature's Classroom was a week long. We were bussed out to the park every day, where we spent the day learning about the natural world in Florida. We went on hikes, we learned to canoe in the Hillsborough River. They emphasized teaching us things we would need to know if we were out in the woods and/or lost, like what you can and cannot eat, and where to not step, stuff like that. We learned about poisonous and non poisonous animals and reptiles, and they made us hold a snake. I say made us, because I'm terrified of snakes. I held a tiny little snake for about 5 seconds, and I was done with that.
I am a lucky woman. I grew up and went to school in a golden age, a time when public education was considered a high priority and fully funded.

[jpak]

31. The First Earth Day 1970

We took a bus to the University of Maine for the Big Toodooo there.

The bus driver fell asleep and ran us into the median of I-95 - right next to the stinkiest pig farm I ever had to endure.

Bought 2 books that shaped my budding political insight.

The Environmental Handbook



ABM An Evaluation of the Decision to Deploy an Antiballistic Missile System

[Aristus]

32. 1975 - Johnston Elementary School, Fort Huachuca, AZ.

We went to Tombstone to see the famed Wild West town, which is still, as back then, a functioning municipality, not a ghost town. We visited their own elementary school, and had lunch with their students.

[Iggo]

35. Two of 'em.

Last edited Sun Jul 14, 2019, 06:44 PM - Edit history (1)

Our "Little Kids With Good Grades Club" (the school called it "The MGM Class", but I hated that) went to see some stage shows back when I was in 4th 5th and 6th grade, around '70 to '73 I figure.

One was about Joan of Arc. Might've been called that, don't remember. I do remember John Boy as The Dauphin, though.

The other one was "Gypsy". I remember the songs were fun. But the most memorable part of that outing was meeting DeForest Kelley. (He wasn't in the show. Just watching it like the rest of us, which for me kinda made it cooler.)

[targetpractice]

36. Local Phone Company... Small Town, IL circa 1975

Not favorite, but memorable... Small 6th grade honors group toured the phone company of my small town.

At one point the tour guide took us into a room and explained how all the local phone lines routed through this room. He explained how different banks of copper lines were coming from different neighborhoods, and all the columns were labeled by exchange and each particular line had a number. It one point I realized the guide was standing in front of a bank of lines where our family's number would be (based on the labels). He pointed to a line with an indicator light and told us the light meant an active call. He unclipped a handset from his belt/holster and plugged into the active line while saying something like, "We really aren't allowed to listen to active calls."

I think he pulled a trigger on the handset and we could hear the active conversation between a man and a woman. I recognized the voice immediately, and yelled, "That's my Mom." But, the man was definitely not my Dad. The tour guide quickly unplugged the handset, and said it was unlikely that it was my mother.

To this day I am sure it was my mother, and I figured years later who the man (definitely NOT my father) was.

[Iggo]

37. Oh wait, how could I forget?!?!?!

The Treasures Of Tutankhamun (1978-ish)

EDIT: I wasn't sure about the picture until I saw Striped Shirt Guy. Evidently, I'm from a long time ago!

[Kali]

40. how long did that tour? because I am pretty sure I saw it and it would have had to have been 75 or 6

and that was going to be my reply to the OP, too.

[Iggo]

42. Nov '76 to Apr '79.

I don't think it got to us in L.A. until '78.

[Kali]

44. I think it was in San Francisco...

we were in Menlo Park for a year, my father was doing a fellowship at Stanford. Such good public schools there. We also did like a week (?) at a camp in the forest somewhere. First time I ever saw a banana slug. in the drinking fountain.

[AJT]

50. Hey.....there's Waldo!

[JCMach1]

38. Human autopsy for Psysiology

In HS

[Kali]

41. way cool!

jealous. had a private trip to view a dog spay at a vet clinic.

[JCMach1]

65. It was optional... some kids couldn't deal...

[Kali]

66. That was the situation for us

With the cats we disected.

[IcyPeas]

39. The Liberty Bell and the Wonder Bread factory

1970. I enjoyed the bus ride from Queens, NY to Philadelphia.

The song by Paul McCartney "Maybe I'm Amazed" always reminds me of that trip.

On a similar note, my Mom was a Cub Scout Leader in 1966 and she brought her troop (and me) to the Wonder Bread factory bakery tour. At the end of the tour where we saw bread being made we got a tiny loaf of Wonder Bread. It's the tiny loaf I remember most.

[Iggo]

43. That's crazy. Same thing for us at the Weber's plant back in '68.

Little loaf of bread at the end.

Best part...lol.

[CloudWatcher]

45. Camarillo State Hospital (California)

Not sure if it was grade school or Jr High, mid '60s I suspect. We met a lot of the patients, many had checked themselves in when the outside world became too much. I remember thinking what a great thing it was that mental health care was freely available to those that needed it. Wikipedia tells me it closed in 1996, but the support system was crippled long before that.

I grew up never having seen a homeless person. Panhandlers and hobos were just romanticized stories from the Great Depression or something you'd might encounter in poor countries. Now every homeless person I see reminds me of this hospital and just how poorly we're serving the mentally ill.

[hunter]

51. The Ventura County Sheriffs made sure you didn't see any homeless people.

They were brutal.

They didn't make the homeless problem go away, they only made it invisible.

They were also very good at harassing anyone else who "didn't belong" in affluent white neighborhoods.

One of my brother's friends was an orderly at the State Hospital. Nicest guy in the world. He had pretty much the same job at the hospital as he did as a bouncer at...

I'd best stop there.

Mental health care in those days was primitive.

Fifty years from now I hope people are saying the same about today's standard of care.

[NNadir]

47. New York City, 5th grade. The whole week.

The Empire State Building, Horn and Hardarts, the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum, and a tour of the Pan Am Hangers at JFK.

We spent about a month, reading and learning and anticipating the city. I was a rube kid on Long Island and it was a whole new world.

My parents weren't all that impressed. They were born in the city and were glad to be out of it.

My other best grade school field trip was my oldest son's fifth grade trip, on which I was an accompanying parent: Philadelphia. The Constitution Center and Independence Hall were both very moving.

[panader0]

48. I held hands with Margaret Lester in sixth grade at a performance

of the 1812 Overture (Tchaikovsky) somewhere in Abilene.
I got razzed for weeks over this PDA.

[Shrek]

49. Potato chip factory

Unlimited free samples at the end.

[hibbing]

67. Haha, glad I scrolled through this thread, me too!...

It was a local brand that of course sadly went out of business decades ago. What I remeber most is that they gave us samples still warm, right out of thr fryer and from the coneyor belt. I loved chips before then, but it solidified my passion.

Peace

[tymorial]

52. Boston Museum of Science or The New England Aquarium.

It's a tough call.

[dameatball]

53. 1962, Silver Springs, FL on an elementary school field trip.

That was pre-Disney and the old fashioned tourist places were booming. Saw where they filmed Tarzan and (I think) Creature From the Black Lagoon (although that may have been elsewhere...Weeki Wachee maybe?)
We had box lunches and a little bit of spending money. Saw the monkeys that had been released after the Tarzan filming. As far as I know there are descendants still there today. At least they didn't throw poop at us.
My son tells me that Silver Springs has become a bit run down these days, but in 1962 it was the bomb. The glass bottom boats were awesome!

[Cracklin Charlie]

54. I never had a field trip in grade school.

But, my friend found a mastodon on her property. Truth.

[mainstreetonce]

59. Me neither

We did go to a library once.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

55. The first field trip I remember (and it was memorable because it was the first)

was a trip to a broom factory sometime about 1953. I don't know why they took us there, but they herded us little first-graders onto a bus and took us to a broom factory. It would have been somewhere in Wisconsin near West Bend. What I remember most was the bus ride and the fact that the place was sort of gloomy and dusty and there were all these piles and bundles of straw. After we got back we had to write a little description of what we saw on that cheap paper full of wood chips with thick lines and thin lines so you could write your large and small letters in proper proportion. Old-fashioned brooms made of straw still make me think of that field trip.

[hunter]

56. Griffith Park Observatory and Travel Town, 'sixties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_Town_Museum

Travel Town because TRAINS!

My favorites at the observatory were watching the sun, the Tesla Coil and the cloud chamber which is where I first realized cosmic rays were always going through me, alas without giving me any superpowers.

[snowybirdie]

58. Back before time

Our Catholic School had one field trip a year for everyone. A picnic. However, it was only for the boys. Girls had to go to school!

[LuckyLib]

60. No field trips ever. Poor Catholic school with very

large classes. Reading, handwriting, religion, math. No science.

[Freddie]

61. A chick hatchery

Was the 2nd grade class trip since time began at my school. Eggs would be kept warm in big boxes under lights and a while later the adorable fuzzy chicks would be sorted male/female and sent off. We got to watch the ladies sort the chicks. The business is still there 50+ years later, moved to a bigger building on the other side of town. I pass it quite often and I imagine they’re doing things the exact same way.

[Laffy Kat]

62. It's no longer politically correct...

But it was a visit to a museum and burial mounds of southern Native Americans. I think I was a third grader, so maybe seven-or eight-years-old, 1964-ish. It was the first time I ever saw a real skeleton and I was fascinated by the sights and culture. It has always stayed with me. It has since been taken over by Memphis University.

https://www.memphis.edu/chucalissa/

[Texasgal]

63. The LBJ ranch

in Johnson City, TX. 1976.

It was spring time and the bluebonnets were everywhere. When we got to the ranch Lady Bird Johnson greeted us!

We had a picnic on the grounds surrounded by huge oak trees and big Longhorns off in the fields.

We went many years after that but my first class trip there was the most memorable.

[yellowdogintexas]

64. I think it was 6th grade but we all piled into a bus

with our hardboiled eggs and chips and went to Nashville to tour the Hermitage. (that's Andrew Jackson's home). It is a beautiful old house.

Mammoth Cave would have been more fun, cooler temperature and only 1/2 hour further away.

[ProudLib72]

69. I don't know if it counts, but in the 6th grade we went on a week long excursion

up to a mountain camp. There was a lot to do and see. The only thing I disliked was being on dining hall duty. The most memorable part was the sleeping arrangements. There were two big rooms for sleeping, one for each gender. In each room were what seemed like a million old bunk beds, certainly more than there were of us. The teachers warned us that, if we wanted to sleep in the top bunk, we must have someone else sleeping below us. Sure, it made sense because these bunk beds were really rickety and were likely to flip over if loaded only on the top. Well, after a couple of days, nobody was paying attention, so I slipped into the upper bunk when there was no one below me. At some point in the middle of the night, I rolled off the top bunk. I woke up rolling around in my sleeping bag on the floor. I was so worried that I would get in trouble for sleeping in the top bunk with no one below me! Luckily no one else woke up, so just slid into the bottom bunk and pretended like nothing happened.

The other thing was that the teachers warned us we could only shower for three minutes. I was so afraid of being caught half way through a shower and having my water turned off that I just didn't take a shower the whole time. Remember, this was 6th grade, camping, hiking, getting really dirty. My mother picked me up at the end of the week. As soon as she smelled me, she rushed me home and into the shower ASAP.