Fun and Educational Family Travel Tips

When you visit the Great Smoky Mountains, a visit to Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum may not be on the top of your list.  But, I guarantee, if you have children between the ages of 8 and 13, they will really want to make a stop at this museum of sorts.

 While at Ripley Believe It or Not Museum, you will see a number of strange and unusual sites.  To extend this visit further and to make it a bit more educational, encourage your child to pretend he or she is a newspaper reporter.  Then, tell your child to gather as much information as possible about a person or event that is on display at the museum.  Remind your child that a good reporter covers 6 questions:

• Who?
• What?
• When?
• Where?
• Why?
• How?

Your child’s job as a junior reporter will be to try to answer these questions based on the information at the display.  When you get back to the hotel room, have your child make a newspaper and write one or more stories to be included in the paper. 

If you have a laptop with you and your child is computer-savvy, let him or her create the newspaper template on the computer.  Otherwise, a hand drawn newspaper will be just fine.  Tell your child to include a header like in a real newspaper.  If your hotel gives you a free paper in the morning, let your child take a look at the front page in order to see how a real newspaper should look.

When your child is done with the paper, ask him or her to read it back to as if he or she is a news anchor reporting the story on the news.

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