How I Made Our Trip to Iguazu Falls Fun and Educational for Our Autistic Daughter
Since we are homeschooling our daughter, I try to find educational opportunities wherever we go. Our family recently went on a trip to Iguazu Falls in Argentina and Brazil and I tried my best to make this trip fun, entertaining and educational for our daughter. While she does love being outside and she loves nature, I really wanted to lean into her special interests to make this trip as fun and as memorable as possible.
Her special interest happens to be animals, so that made things pretty easy for us. I decided to make a little packet for her with brief details about the waterfalls, the Brazil side, the Argentina side, and then went in detail about the animals. Both parks have basic animals as well as rare or unique animals. I made fact sheets about each of the more well-known animals along with a coloring section for each. I wanted to make sure she knew them enough to recognize them when she spotted them. During homeschool the week before our trip, she went through and very intentionally colored each page so it matched what the animal actually looked like.
On the very last page, I made a bingo board for her. Our family does a lot of bingo and I figured she could do it while out seeing these animals. This meant whatever she got on this trip was a bingo prize and not just randomly getting a toy on our trip. The goal of the bingo board was to be able to check off the animals as SHE saw them so she had to really be aware of her surroundings to catch everything. Since it was a very warm day, we saw a lot of animals on the Argentina side of Iguazu Falls out and about. After we went to the Argentina side of the falls, we went to an animal preserve where there are animals being rehabilitated to be re-released out into the wild or are kept at the animal preserve because they can't be released out into the wild.
When we went to the Brazil side of Iguazu Falls, it was pouring rain so we didn't get to see any animals that day at all. We even planned to go to a bird park in Brazil, but it was raining too hard. Because of the weather issues, she didn't ever technically get an official bingo. However, she got four out of five on one of the rows and I told her that if she saw rare animals that weren't on the board, like the ocelot at the animal sanctuary, she got extra points. Those extra points went towards a bingo even if she didn't completely get one. Considering the weather was completely out of her control, I thought that was only fair.
She is always asking me what animals eat, especially new animals she's learning about. Having our little animal packet handy was really great for me, but also for her because I didn't have to answer those questions for her. She already chose her bingo prize which was a little stuffed coati, which is an animal that is very common in this area. It has a cute little shirt that says I heart cataratas, which is Spanish and Portuguese for waterfalls which we thought was a really fun and appropriate little souvenir. And the little shirt comes off so you can just have it be a little coati.
Overall the trip was so fun and our little learning bingo was so great for her. I will definitely be doing something similar to this when we go on our next excursion to Ushuaia, or the End of the World, so stay tuned for that!
