I love taking my children on field trips.  Whether we are going with a homeschool group or just as a family, this is something that has added to our educational experience over the years.  To name a few, we have been up mountains, to zoos, museums, corn patches, and river boat rides.  We have been to chicken farms in rural Arkansas, an alligator hatchery in southern Louisiana, Dr. Pepper plant in Waco, Texas, a power plant (two days before a hurricane was coming in) on the Gulf Coast, and just last week we went to the WDAM TV studio, Way Down Around Moselle, Mississippi.

These are just a few field trips we’ve taken over the years.  More recently we have been to the wetlands in Canada, to a dessert in the southwest United States, and to a rainforest in Belize, Central America.  While I would like to say that we hopped on a plane or took an excursion to these places we did not.   After all, the world is full of many amazing places to visit and the average family can only go to so many of them.  Therefore, these field trips were taken in our home, around the kitchen table.   I am referring to The Digital Field Trip Series by Digital Frog International. 

You may wonder like I did.  Just who is Digital Frog International? 

They are passionate creators of natural science software.  Digital Frog is probably most known for their virtual frog dissection software but they offer more, including the Digital Field Trip Series to the Wetlands, Dessert, and Rainforest.

When we loaded the DVD into our computer we first choose to visit the Blue Creek Rainforest Reserve in Belize.  We took a tour and explored 360-degree panoramas using QuickTime Virtual Reality.  We viewed stunning photographs and interesting videos of the rainforest.  We spent an hour just looking at all of the information and will go back to learn much more.  During this study you can learn of the types of rainforest of the world, the difference between temperate and tropical forest, about endangered forest, global benefits, human impact, and statistics.  You can study the mechanisms of the rainforest, the animal and plant characteristics, and the dependency web.  You can take a quiz or play a game.  And that is just a few of the attributes to one field trip.  Don’t forget there are two more.

When I first received this product to review I was somewhat apprehensive.  To be honest I thought the price of $125 for a computer DVD was a little too steep.  We live on a budget and I know most other homeschool families do as well; therefore, I am very careful about the curriculum we choose.  However, after spending some time investigating this product my concerns were calmed.  There is a wealth of information on each trip.  This software can be used to support learning K-12. In addition to the field trip, each trip folder comes with full student and teacher workbook material that are located on the disc.  The rainforest workbook alone is 65 pages.  We could not even begin to cover all of the information in these few weeks.  So, I have planned to extend our study into several months over this next year.   I also see us using this in the years to come as well.

To learn more about Digital Frog Internationals or to see what others are saying about the product you can click here.

Disclaimer:  As a member of The Old Schoolhouse 2010-2011 Crew, I received The Digital Field Trip Series free of charge in exchange for an honest product review.   I do not receive any other form of compensation for the reviews posted on this blog.