Benefits

How your child will benefit

For many Canadian and American students, a field trip across the border can be 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 U.S. 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.

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 some 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 zip code is not the center of the known universe (of course, it’s not necessarily Montréal, Quebec City, New York City or Chicago 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 can be a very memorable civics lesson about national frontiers for our American and 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 their passport.

In any case, we hope and expect that your child will learn more about the world and its ways during a VISIT CANADA field trip 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.