Planning your Trip
1, 2, 3 Booking
Choose two or three possible dates for your trip. Also have an idea of how large your group will be.
Download our Group Reservation Form.
Pick an activity, fill it out, and send it in at least two weeks before your earliest pick.
Although we cannot accommodate all first choices of date, we’ll contact you as soon as possible to confirm your space.
Preparations
Ideas For Preparing Yourself Before The Field Trip
Visit Mastodon Ridge before your trip with colleagues and chaperones. Teachers who bring an NSTU or teacher-identification card receive free admission and 15% off resource materials in our DinoStore.
Purchase postcards, posters, science kits, books and more in our new DinoStore.
Consider attending one of our teacher information sessions (see calendar of events for details).
Ideas for preparing your students before the trip
Discuss students’ own collections, and discuss how museums and other places like Mastodon Ridge keep certain important treasures safe. Have them bring in their collections and talk about how they add to, sort, take care of and display their collections.
Introduce map-reading skills in connection with the field trip.
Introduce latitude and longitude (junior high). Have children find other cities that are also halfway from the North Pole to the Equator.
Introduce visual skills. Let students describe in detail ordinary objects, like a paper clip, paintbrush, clothespin, or comb to their classmates.
Introduce concept of time. Talk about time in terms of evolution, periods of history, science.
Make students "specialists" in one aspect of the subjects we cover at Mastodon Ridge (i.e. Ice Age, native people, Halfway Point from the North Pole to the Equator). Assign student groups different subject areas related to the field trip topic to research (e.g., science, heritage, history, technology, etc).
Plan several days of lessons around your visit to Mastodon Ridge. Give students open-ended questions that get them to gather information throughout the visit.
Position your activities as a treasure hunt, a safari, a game, an adventure, a "Journey to the World of ...", a mystery. Have students teach each other.
Time Spent on the bus
Time spent getting to and from Mastodon Ridge is part of the field trip, too.
Ask students to name as many songs as they can whose titles contain words related to dinosaurs, natural history, Nova Scotia. Give prizes for students willing to sing the songs.
Create simple drawings of things kids will see on the way to Mastodon Ridge, such as the airport, river, statues, etc. Be sure to include Mastodon Ridge! Have students circle the items as they see them.
Ask students to describe all the ways they can see that humans have changed the environment.
