Trifter

Cave of the Mounds: A Rock Solid Lesson in Geology

As a home school family, we try to make every experience for our kids as enriching as possible, so when we pick vacation destinations, we try to find places that will serve as school field trip and aid in their overall development. This year, as Earth Science Week approached I was inspired to look for a school field trip that might spark an interest in geology.

“Geology?” my kids moaned, when I showed them the syllabus for the science course I had put together.

“Do we HAVE to do geology?” my daughter had asked.

“Couldn’t we just do extra chemistry, instead?” my son added.

I put on a brave face for my kids, explaining the many benefits of studying geology.

“Geology helps us understand the history of our planet,” I said.

“We can just read about the history of our planet,” my son countered. The world doesn’t need us to discover that.”

My next try: “Geology is important because it is the study of geology that has allowed us to access fossil fuels.”

“But aren’t fossil fuels bad for the environment?” My nine year old objected.

Finally, grasping at straws, I said, “Kids, you have to learn this, because you need it to prepare you for college.  Besides, it’s almost Earth Science week.”

Here is where I have to admit that I actually hated geology in school. Earth Science Week would not have inspired me back then.

So I decided to pull out all the stops. Since our monthly overnight school field trip was coming up, I hunted around for an interesting geological formation to visit. That’s when I found The Cave of the Mounds, in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. We live about three hours from this site, so I found a very reasonably priced hotel called the Deer Valley Lodge ($69 per night for a family of four, includes an indoor water park), just minutes away from the cave. We packed our overnight bags and headed off on our monthly overnight school field trip.

We were not disappointed. While Cave of the Mounds is not as big as Mammoth, it is every bit as much fun to visit. The tour guide was very knowledgeable, and the introductory film and guided tour provided an outstanding jumping off point for our study of geology.

My kids loved the tour so much that they wanted to immediately go again! So we purchased a Keys to the Cave membership for them. They went on the next tour. The next day, before we left town, we also visited “Little Norway,” which is an outdoor museum of traditional Norwegian buildings left over from an immigrant Norwegian family who settled in the area.   As a school field trip in it’s own right, it offered much to see and learn, and it reinforced much of what my children had been studying in history, in our unit about 18th Century America.

After Earth Science Week we made a second school field trip for the Cave’s Halloween activities, which included trick or treating in the cave. Instead of handing out sweets, they handed out minerals and fossils. Our costumed guide had a different spiel than the guide we had seen before, so the kids learned about the Cave from a different perspective. Before forking over the geological treats at various checkpoints, the guide required the children to answer a question about what she had just taught them during that portion of the tour. By the end of the tour, my children had mastered a new set of concepts about caves and geology.

So now they each have a fossil and rock collection.  Earth Science Week will be something to look forward to every year.  They are excited so excited about geology that they want to study it all year long.  Words like “sedimentary rock” and “phosphorescent” have crept into their daily conversations.  We now have plans to return to Cave of the Mounds throughout the year to take advantage of our membership, and then we  will make a school field trip down to Mammoth Cave for a grand finale.  My kids now love geology so much that they talk about rocks and minerals and land formations all the time, not just during Earth Science Week.