TAP is Back!!!

TAP Adventures is excited to announce that we are back. After taking a break for a few years, we are excited to travel the world again with local students and teachers!!! In June of 2024, we will be spending 8 glorious days traveling through Costa Rica, checking out all the sites and learning Spanish!!!

TAP was started in 2007 as Minooka TAP – or the Minooka Travel Abroad Program – by a group of teachers from Minooka Junior High School (but the group is not, and never has been affiliated with any one school or school district). Over the course of the next 13 years, we traveled with over 500 students to 35 different countries on 5 continents including Germany, France, England, Ireland, Japan, Spain, South Africa, Italy, and Greece. In 2016, we began including students from other communities, and we’ve now traveled with kids from Plainfield, Naperville, Batavia, Aurora, Oswego, Channahon, Yorkville, and Chicago. Any students from grades 7-12 that are interested in traveling with us are welcome. That same year, we changed our name to TAP Adventures to reflect the larger community our travelers come from.

This Costa Rican Adventure will be our 14th trip abroad with students, and we hope to build a great group of kids that can learn from one another. With each group, we prepare for nearly a year before travel – holding monthly meetings to help get the students ready to explore the world. These meetings focus on academics like culture, history, science, geography, language, food, music, and art – as well as digging into logistics like passports, packing for a trip like this, getting through the airport with a large group, how meals and hotels will work with a big group… We also spend a great deal of time looking at the financials – helping students understand foreign currency and how to budget their spending while on tour.

The final aspect of learning we focus on pre-travel is the social aspect. Many of our students don’t know one another before joining the group, but we want everyone to return home from Costa Rica missing a place that isn’t home and feeling like people that were virtual strangers a few days earlier are like family. The roots of that begin at our meetings here at home.

Since 2010, TAP students have published their own books. From that very first year, we saw students and teachers lugging around thick, heavy travel guides – most of which were stuffed with loads of information they didn’t need. So, starting with our Ireland 2010 group, we began helping students research, write, edit, format, and publish their own books. These books are focused on the things our students are most interested in learning about – along with activities and journal pages to help them reflect upon the things we’re experiencing our tour. Nearly 400 TAP students have been able to put on their college applications and resumes that they are published authors!!!

Our 2024 Adventure in Costa Rica will focus on learning the Spanish language. Each morning, our students will participate in language workshops focused on different aspects of Costa Rican life: food, music, ecology, the rainforest… then we will take excursions to practice our Spanish. For example, on food day, we’ll learn food, farming, and cooking terms before heading to the marketplace to shop for ingredients and head to a Costa Rican cooking class. Other excursions will include dance lessons, a tour of the rainforest canopy, kayaking, white water rafting, and a visit to sea turtle breeding grounds. The trip will be 8 days in June of 20214 and will be open to any students from the area who will have finished 7th grade that spring. Because of the language classes and the size of the busses in Costa Rica, this trip will be limited to just 26 students. Check out the detailed itinerary here.

If you are interested in joining the adventure, fill out our application at the link below. Fill out our student application here or reach out to us at Minookatap2 @ gmail.com if you have any questions.