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Spring Break Ideas for Upper School Families
Head of Upper School updates Middle School list to include activities for older GPS students
The Great Outdoors
- Pack a picnic and have lunch in your own backyard!
- Use the iNaturalist app to discover all the amazing plants blooming in your backyard and beyond.
- Challenge yourself to continue with your exercise routine.
- Start a 2020 Victory Garden. Order seeds online (if they are still available) or use your own kitchen scraps to start a garden.
- Go camping in the backyard. Make a star finder and look for as many constellations as you can find!
- Wash your car or the family car.
- Do some backyard bird watching. Use the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to guide your identification.
- Go for a hike with your immediate family. Check out Roots Rated for trail maps and information about all of our beautiful trails in the area. Double check to be sure they are still open before departing.
- Ride all 13 miles of the Tennessee Riverwalk. Start at the Chickamauga Dam and go all the way past Ross’s Landing towards St. Elmo. Again, check before leaving as some parts might be closed.
#adulting-Life Skill Development
- Learn how to change a tire on your car by watching this video.
- Learn to wash your own clothes in this video.
- Learn to balance a checkbook in this video.
- Learn “7 Self-Defense Moves for Women” in this video.
Indoor Fun and Excitement
- Get three months of free guitar lessons from Fender.
- Spring cleaning: go through closets and get rid of (or donate!) anything you haven’t used or worn in a year.
- Express some gratitude. Write thank you letters to your UPS/USPS drivers, your letter carrier, your teachers, or a family member or friend who you have not seen in a while.
- Fill out a foster home application for McKamey or The Humane Society, volunteering to foster an animal until it is ready for adoption.
- Learn origami and make cranes for your loved ones.
- Play board games and dust off those old puzzles. Or find a deck of cards or dice and invent your own game!
- Bake bread—find some great recipes online and make your house smell so good. Like sweets? Time to put those Pinterest recipes to work.
- Visit Chef Brad’s site, ChattaChef Kitchen, to learn how to make some of his great recipes!
- Paint something amazing with those art supplies you took home!
- Set up and carry out some at-home science experiments. There are a lot of good websites with fun experiments. Here are some fun ones from Steve Spangler Science and from Bill Nye The Science Guy!
- Learn how to knit or crochet; make something for a friend or family member and send it to them!
- Listen to bedtime stories told by Dolly Parton in Goodnight Dolly.
Virtual Visits and Experiences
- Visit the TN Aquarium and the IMAX from home!
- Visit the safari exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo each day at 3 p.m., from the comfort of your own home. Or, check out the live cams at the San Diego Zoo!
- Did you hear about the penguins that got to explore the marine exhibits while the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago is closed? Check out their adventures here!
- Want to keep up on your French language acquisition? Join the French Cultural Center in Boston every Wednesday at 2 p.m., for French storytime.
- Love computer science? Brush up on your coding skills at code.org or create stories, games, and animations at scratch.mit.edu.
- Experience, virtually, some absolutely amazing museums:
- Guggenheim Museum, New York
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (two virtual exhibits on fashion and Vermeer)
- Musée d’Orsay, Paris
- National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul
- Pergamon Museum, Berlin
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
- The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
- Uffizi Gallery, Florence
- MASP, São Paulo
- National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City
- Take a virtual field trip to these five National Parks: Kenai Fjords National Park (Alaska), Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park (Hawaii), Carlsbad Caverns National Park (New Mexico), Bryce Canyon National Park (Utah), Dry Tortugas National Park (Florida).
- Take a virtual field trip to Yellowstone, Glacier National Park or Zion National Park through Google Earth.
- Take a class with the National Weather Service and become our next hometown meteorologist!
- Broadway may have gone dark, but you can still watch some of the shows!
