Educaching Review

Educaching is an innovative curriculum that combines education and geocaching. If you’ve never heard of geocaching, you can think about it as a high tech treasure hunt using your gps.

We loved the idea of incorporating our gps into our school day. Munchkin would learn how to use technology, get exercise, and learn all at the same time. Sounds like a plan to me.

The Educaching teacher’s manual starts off with teachers training. You will cover:

• What is GPS? What is Educaching?
• Learning the Lingo (terms you need to know in the gps, educaching world)
• Lesson Plans & Subject Integration
• Equipment and Gear (what to look for in a gps unit, other necessary equipment)
• Management (how to prepare and implement the lesson)

The next section is filled with actual Educaching lesson plans. There are beginner, intermediate, and advanced lessons. Each lesson is labeled with the level, objectives, and needed materials. All lessons align with the National Standards in education. The specific standards that are covered are stated at the beginning of the lesson.

The third section contains the field sheets (worksheets) that go along with the individual lesson plans.

The fourth section covers how to obtain a gps unit for little to no cost using fundraising, donations, educational discounts, borrowing, grants, and grant writing.

The final section shows additional ways that Educaching can be used beyond the basic lesson plans.

Educaching can be used in homeschools, clubs, church groups, classrooms…

We decided to start our Educaching adventure with the dinosaur lesson.

We started off by reading  The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins.  I was able to pick this up off of paperbackswap since I couldn’t find it at our local library.  It was a fun read, but the real adventure began when we had to search “Central Park” to find the buried dinosaur bones…  I hid the dinosaur bones (inside dinosaur eggs) making note of their coordinates.  I then gave the coordinates to Munchkin so she could locate the bones.

It took a little effort to find everything, but Munchkin had a blast.  The adventure did not end there though, as she still had to put the bones together and draw her own dinosaur.

I think this curriculum would work great as a homeschool group activity.  For best results in a group situation, you would want multiple gps units to allow the kids to break into small groups.

Educaching is available for instant download in an electronic format for $32.00 or a hardcopy version for $32.00 plus $6.95 shipping and handling. They also offer packages that include a gps unit.