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| ...we hope and expect that your child will learn more about the world and its ways during a visit to Canada than during any other three or four days in the school year. |
There are some very specific reasons why VISIT CANADA has become North America's leading operator of educational tours to Canada. Things like this never happen by accident.
First and foremost, we are a group of serious professionals, deeply and uniformly committed to the creation of the finest quality educational field trip programs anywhere.
We are sharply focused on school field trip programs. It's all we do, and all we've ever done, all day, every day, since the fall of 1985.
We know schools, we know teachers and, most importantly, we know kids. We know what tires and bores them, we know what interests and excites them; we know what they'll eat and what they won't. And, as well as anybody, we know how to manage them when they're away from home on a field trip.
Notre Dame Basilica, the Jewel of Montréal |
Our groups are accommodated in first-class or deluxe hotels, most of which have been inspected and regularly reinspected by senior management.
We personally check virtually every menu item in every restaurant to make sure that every group's experience is positive, educational and memorable.
Our tour itineraries are meticulously crafted to ensure that students get the absolute maximum from their limited time in Montreal or Quebec City. We won't waste your kids' time swimming in a hotel swimming pool, or dancing in a hotel meeting room, or anything else that they could just as easily do at home. If there are better tour itineraries anywhere, we've never seen them.
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For many American students, a field trip to Canada is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit a foreign country and to meet and interact with people with a different language and a distinctly different culture.
Students of French (from the US and Canada) will read French signs and hear French spoken from the moment they cross the Québec border, and they'll have many opportunities to use language skills that they've learned in class in everyday situations.
The Copper Museum, Québec City |
In addition to hearing and reading new words and phrases, the fundamental lesson is that the study of a foreign language is a practical tool and not just an academic exercise.
For many younger students, the trip is a first overnight away from home and parents (and a first experience budgeting their own lunch and shopping money over a period of several days). This expression of confidence imparts a measure of maturity, independence and worldliness in many kids. You'll see the difference when the trip is over.
Your son or daughter will quickly learn that your hometown is not the center of the known universe (of course, it's not necessarily Toronto or Montréal or Quebec City either). He or she will learn, and remember, that there are people with different ideas, different tastes, and vastly different lifestyles, literally millions of them, living just a few hundred miles from their home.
Crossing the border into Canada can be a very memorable civics lesson about national frontiers for our non-Canadian students. A uniformed customs or immigration agent stepping onto the bus and asking to see evidence of citizenship makes a big impression on students who have never thought very hard about their own citizenship before, or about the real value of a U.S. or British passport.
In any case, we hope and expect that your child will learn more about the world and its ways during a visit to Canada than during any other three or four days in the school year, and we'd be surprised if many of the lessons don't stay with them for a lifetime. |
We pride ourselves on the effort we make to keep your children safe and secure on our field trips. Day in and day out, year after year; this is our first and highest priority.
Every group is accompanied throughout the day in Montréal, Quebec City, Toronto or Vancouver by a professional guide, licensed where licensing exists, and VISIT CANADA makes a place available for an adult chaperone from your child's school (usually a faculty member) for each tenth student.
Each chaperone receives our copyrighted Manual for Chaperones, containing a wealth of extremely useful information about how to anticipate and prevent problems long before they occur, and every guide is provided with a copy of our Safety Manual for Guides and Escorts.
The Hotel Loews le Concorde, Quebec |
We also provide every group with a copy of our Field Trip Safety Manual, which contains an abundance of important information that we've compiled over the years about pedestrian safety, fire safety, accident prevention and other related safety and security topics. We are very proud of these copyrighted manuals, which, as far as we know, are the only reference works of their kind in existence.
Finally, we select our hotels on the basis of safety, security and cleanliness, and never use marginal hotels for kids that wouldn't be perfectly appropriate for adults. Moreover, we contract with each hotel to provide overnight security in the hallways to keep members of your child's group in their rooms after curfews, and non-members out.
In short, we want your kids to be as safe and secure on our trips as they would have been if they had not left home.
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Your child's teachers have selected a VISIT CANADA field trip on the basis of its quality and educational significance for your son or daughter, and not on the basis of any commissions paid back to them for selecting our company to operate it.
We appreciate and empathize with the teachers who organize our trips. We know that some parents think of the field trips as free vacations for the teachers who lead them. This is quite unfair.
Taking your child to Canada is a big responsibility. Teachers typically devote months to pre-trip planning and record-keeping, and long, long hours supervising the students while on the trip. Teachers who select our trips do so without compensation, and the trips themselves often take place on weekends that the teacher would otherwise spend with their families.
In short, the trips are not free, and they're anything but a vacation!
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