This is another revisit…and since we were all sheltering at home for the last months of the school year, one that we’re probably all thinking about with longing. 😉 Coming at you originally from May of 2015, when Rowyn was only 7 and Xoe was 9, which of course gave me all the “awwww”s when I saw the picture I had in this one, from the year before that. 😉 (Still not sure how my babies are now going into 7th and 10th!)

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Since someone asked me about this over the weekend, I figured, hey–already looked it up, might as well share! 😉 Especially appropriate since this is our last week of school. Oh yeah. Right about now the kids are mighty glad we didn’t take a bunch of snow days! 😉

Field trip comes from the idea of field…not as in “an open piece of land, often cultivated” (which dates from time immemorial) but from the idea of field being a place where things happen. This is a slightly newer meaning that began evolving in the 1300s. (I said slightly newer, not new, LOL.) By then it could mean a battleground. And by mid-century, a “sphere or place of related things.” By the mid-1700s people would refer to field-work as anything that took one out of the office or laboratory and into the world, where things take place.

Field trip, then, is a natural extension of this meaning. It’s a trip into the field, going out of the classroom and into the world where the things you’ve been learning about can be found. Though an actually-new phrase (from the 1950s), it has its foundation on a nicely aged idea. =)

My kiddos on a field trip to a one room school house in 2014. Rowyn would be the lonely boy in the boys line, LOL, and Xoe is the one in teal and purple. (No, shockingly, not the one dressed in period attire, LOL.) They had a blast that day, and Xoe even won the little spelling bee!

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