With millions of people around the world finding themselves in their homes and social distancing, travel right now isn’t an option. Homeschooling and virtual schooling is now the norm, with no typical field trip as options right now. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go on adventure! Technology has provided some amazing resources and experiences – where we can stay connected and still travel virtually to some incredible places. So, whether you just need an escape or you’re looking for educational resources and ideas for your kids at home, this list has you covered with 50+ virtual field trips you can take from home! 
As a former science teacher and avid traveler, I’ve rounded up some of the BEST virtual field trip ideas here from around the world to help you with both educational and/or travel wanderlust needs. The 50+ ideas listed below offer a variety of places and types of content, so you can tailor things for your needs. There are multiple science and nature topics below, as well as geographical and cultural options as well. Many of the links also have educational resources that go with to help with any homeschool/virtual learning needs you have.
So, take your kids on an educational trip or just enjoy visiting a new place around the world with any of these fun virtual field trips!
Virtual Zoo & Aquarium Visits:
Some of our favorite zoos and aquariums around the country (like the San Diego Zoo and Monterey Bay Aquarium) are offering live animal cams and/or doing interactive live sessions that you can watch daily! So, this is a great way to do some learning about animals (or just have a fun escape to see some fun creatures). Here’s our top picks:
- San Diego Zoo – they have fun live animal cams here and a whole website for kids with educational activities, games, facts, and more!
- Monterey Bay Aquarium – live animal cams (gotta love those adorable sea otters)!
- Atlanta Zoo – you can check out the live panda cam here!
- Georgia Aquarium – they have multiple exhibit live cams. We especially love the ocean voyager tank where you can see the whale sharks!
- Smithsonian’s National Zoo – lots of awesome live webcams, including an especially unique one with the naked mole rats!
- Houston Zoo – You can explore the webcams here – we think the leaf cutter ants are especially cool!
- Cincinnati Zoo Home Safaris – The Cincinnati Zoo has started doing home safaris every day on live on their Facebook Page and then posted to Youtube. That home safaris link has resources and links to each day’s video. The first day was with the adorable hippos and we LOVED it!
For additional educational ideas and fun things to keep busy, here’s some fun animal activity ideas that your kids could do that would connect nicely to some of the animal & nature field trips:
- 25+ Rainforest Animal Crafts for Kids
- 25+ Shark Activities & Recipes
- 20+ Bears Activities & Fun Foods
- Finding Dory Printable Educational Ocean Activity Pack
Virtual Nature Field Trips:
- Nature Works is an INCREDIBLE resource, with multiple virtual field trips, videos, and educational resources. I picked my favorite options below, each with varying levels of educational resources that you can use to go with the videos – discussion questions, worksheets, etc! These would function great for some virtual science lessons (especially biology/ecology)!
- Nature Conservancy Oklahoma – tour the plains of Oklahoma
- National Parks Virtual Trips – In partnership with Google, there are some incredible virtual tours of 5 of the United States’ National Parks! One of our very favorites is Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in real life. So we highly recommend these National Park Virtual Field Trips while we’re all unable to travel to these magnificent places. Direct links below:
As a resource for that, you can also have the kids work on Jr. Ranger Programs from home!! <— Click that link from our friend’s over at Park Ranger John for a comprehensive list of Jr. Ranger Programs and how/where to get materials. Some are easily printable right online!
Museums & Famous Places:
Stroll through and take a look around some of the most incredible museums & famous sights in the world! Each location tackles the concept of “virtual tour” or “virtual field trip” a little differently and some are better than others! But this list gives you a lot of cool geographical and cultural things to check out!
- The Louvre, Paris
- The Eiffel Tower, Paris
- Musée d’Orsay, Paris
- The Vatican, Italy
- The British Museum, London
- National Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art, South Korea
- Van Goh Museum, Amsterdam
- Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Washington D.C.
- Queensland Museum Virtual Tour, Australia
- Anne Frank House Secret Annex, Amsterdam
- Interactive Tour of Ellis Island, New York
- Pompei, Italy (From Google Street View – SO cool!)
- The Colosseum
- Great Wall of China (<– that is a website with an interactive map view and other info. Or you can check out this Great Wall Walking Tour on Youtube)
- Pyramids of Giza
City Walking Tours
We’ve discovered a WEALTH of walking tours on Youtube – to transport you away to one of your favorite places or maybe a place you’ve always dreamed of. Or maybe even a place you had tickets to visit and sadly due to these worldly events, you had to cancel your trip (that is true for us and a family trip to London). It’s hard to not be able to go to these places right now, but I love that we can take virtual tours of them!
The walking tours I chose below all have NO talking (other than ambient talking of the people in the city). So, it’s not a cheesy guided tour. It’s just walking around of these places – letting you see what the sights look like there. Some of the videos are many hours long. So, they would be something you could even have on the tv in the background – just to give you a little escape or different perspective from home.
- Chicago
- Paris
- London
- Rome
- Florence
- Venice
- Grindewald, Switzerland
- Sydney, Australia
- Brisbane, Australia
- Jerusalem, Old City
- Waikiki, Hawaii
- Amsterdam
- Amalfi Coast, Italy
- Vilnius, Lithuania
For some additional geography resources for homeschooling, you can check out these awesome free coloring pages & activity sheets here.
Additional Virtual Field Trip Resources:
- Virtual Farms Tours
- MARS (really – MARS! Pretty cool!)
- The Metropolitan Opera – they’ve been streaming an old performance of a different opera each night at at 7:30 EDT which is posted until 3:30 EDT the following day. Great way to get to go on an opera field trip!!
So, I hope these resources help as you navigate this unprecedented time in our lives around the world! May they provide you with a little joy, a little hope, and/or a little help with navigating homeschooling. And, if you’ve found a great resource that you think we should add to the list, be sure to let us know!
