Okay, we have to tell you about something we've been quietly building for months, because we're genuinely excited about it, and we think you will be too.
You know that moment when you're out somewhere with the kids, a garden, a lighthouse, a random little reserve, and you think "there's actually so much learning happening here" but you're too busy chasing a toddler or reading a plaque to turn it into anything more than a nice day out? That's exactly the gap we built this to fill.
It's called Turn This Into a Field Trip, and it's now live on 42 Local Attractions across Victoria and the Sunshine Coast. Same day out you were already going to have. Just with the actual learning sitting right there, ready to go, so you don't have to be the one who plans it.
Two Examples, So You Can See the Range
We didn't want this to be the same formula copy-pasted across 42 pages, so here are two real ones, side by side, to show you what we mean.
Cloudehill Gardens, in the Dandenongs, covers Arts, History & Geography, and Science. It tells the story of a working flower farm that became a garden deliberately split into 25 distinct "rooms," each with its own mood, a real design tradition borrowed from grand English gardens. The activity has you choosing four rooms as you walk through, sketching each one's layout, and picking a single word that captures how it feels, calm, wild, formal, hidden. Then you lay the sketches side by side and talk about what the designer might have been trying to make you feel. There's a science tangent about why this particular cool-climate spot suits the plants growing in it, and it finishes with an "imagine standing here in 1895" prompt that turns into genuine research if your kid takes the bait.
A bushland reserve on Bunurong Country, on the other hand, covers Science and History & Geography, and tells a completely different kind of story. Walked by Bunurong people for a very long time before European settlement, with real stone-tool remains confirming that history, the land later became a military reserve in 1886, driven by a genuine fear at the time that Russia might invade Australia. At its busiest, it held almost 4000 men and 900 horses. During WWI it became a POW camp holding German prisoners, and separately, a hospital for returning soldiers. The army left in 1921, the buildings came down, and the bush simply regrew, so thoroughly that the whole site was declared a flora and fauna reserve in 1985. The activity sends you looking for real physical evidence still hiding in the bush, a stone-capped reservoir, old rifle target butts, a fountain base, while also spotting echidna diggings and listening for some of the roughly 98 recorded bird species that call it home now, including the genuinely rare Southern Emu-wren and Powerful Owl.
One's about art and feeling. The other's about war, ecology and how quickly land heals once people leave it alone. Same feature, completely different kind of day.
Built to Stretch Across Ages, and Across Subjects
One thing we've tried really hard to get right is keeping every activity open-ended enough to genuinely suit different ages. There's no single correct answer sketched into any of these, so a five-year-old picking a feeling-word for a garden room and a twelve-year-old debating what the garden designer was going for can both be doing the same activity, just meeting it at their own level.
We've also deliberately stacked subjects together rather than keeping them in separate boxes, because that's how learning actually happens out in the real world. A single visit to that bushland reserve isn't just history or just science, it's both, tangled together, the same way finding an old rifle target butt naturally leads into a conversation about ecology and time. We think that's a much truer picture of how kids actually learn than a worksheet that says "today we're doing science" ever was.
A Few Honest Notes
Not every one of the 42 has a downloadable printable version yet. We're actively working on adding these to several attractions in each region, rather than holding the whole feature back until every single one is polished and ready. If your favourite spot doesn't have one yet, it's coming.
And 42 is genuinely just the start. As we grow into each new area, more attractions will get their own Turn This Into a Field Trip page, built with the same care as these two.
And If You're a Travelling Family
We think this is going to be especially good for world schooling and travelling families. Landing somewhere brand new with kids in tow and trying to find something meaningful to do with your day is genuinely hard. Now there's a real chance that wherever you've landed, there's already a proper, thought-out activity waiting for you, not just a list of tourist attractions, but something that turns a new place into an actual lesson before you've even had your morning coffee.
Even the Places You Already Know
Here's the other thing worth saying: a lot of these attractions are probably places you've already visited plenty of times. That garden you've walked through a dozen times before. That reserve just down the road you've been to more times than you can count. We'd genuinely love for these lessons to give you a new lens on the places you already know well, not just a reason to discover somewhere new, but a reason to look properly at somewhere familiar and notice what you've walked straight past every other time.
Go Find One Near You
So all of a sudden, your midweek nature walk turns into an exploration of history, art, science, geography, ecology, the lot. Next time you're planning a day out, have a look and see if it's already got a Turn This Into a Field Trip page waiting for you, even somewhere you thought you already knew inside out.
Explore what's near you and see what's already been turned into a field trip.
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