Our First Field Trip – MOSI

I have made a yearly schedule and a daily schedule (more on that in another post.)

Every Monday will be our field trip day or day out. Whether it’s somewhere like a museum or a park, I’m determined to get them out and learn outside of the house every Monday. Since this is our first day at Homeschool, I reviewed what they will be doing tomorrow and what will be expected of them during school hours. After that we set out on our first field trip!

In Tampa, the month of September is known as Swaptember. It’s the month that ZooTampa, MOSI, and Florida Aquarium swap memberships. If you have a membership to one of these places, you can use it at the other two for this month. Since we have a ZooTampa membership, I decided our first field trip would be to MOSI.

It’s been a few years since we’ve been to MOSI. MOSI has condensed to one building now (use to be Kids in Charge building.) There is no gift shop or restaurant, so remember to bring a lunch and snacks, in fact they encourage their visitors to do this. They still have the Planetarium which the lady at the desk convinced us to add on for $5 a person and go to. The Planetarium was so worth it, being one of the first things we did there, the boys learned the most there. 

I made a scavenger hunt for the boys to do while we were at MOSI to keep them engaged. They would’ve been engaged even without the scavenger hunt, next time I’ll just have questions they’ll have to find the answers for. We were there for three hours and still didn’t get to everything. 

One of their favorite exhibits was Mission Moon Base. It was so much fun learning about the moon and pretending we were on the moon base and had different jobs.

The playground they have there is awesome and there’s a few picnic tables outside on the other side of the playground where we had lunch. 

I learned that they offer an Educators discount which applies for Homeschool families too. They also offer homeschool classes once a month. I have to say it’s a great deal and we will be getting a pass and attending some of the classes.

First field trip was a success! Lesson learned: get two clipboards so they can fill out the papers and give them pencils, they don’t do well with pens yet.