There might have been a day when parents and administrators would hesitate to send their school-age children to New York City for fun or education. Today, we dare you to find any city with more educational variety or more exciting and familiar iconic attractions.
Manhattan lends itself to amazing themes. If you’ve got a group interested in theater, there’s no more inspiring attraction than the lights of Broadway. With so many performances to choose from, students can enjoy comedy, musicals, drama, or innovation like the performance art they’ll see in Blue Man Group. To further the theme, you can enroll students in a Broadway Workshop for sessions on choreography, acting, and producing from Broadway professionals.
You’ll find most of the Broadway theaters gathered around Times Square, the exciting intersection of several New York City streets. Brilliant lights define the area because of the over-sized, electronic billboards throughout. Students love Times Square at night, an experience they’ll never forget. During the day it offers shopping in places like the Hershey Store and M&M. Always fun for students, you’ll find Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Madame Tussaud’s here as well.
For educational tours, New York City offers a variety of wonderful museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is breathtaking, with comprehensive galleries that include paintings, sculpture, modern art, fashion, tools, costumes, and so much more. Across Central Park from the Met, you’ll find The American Museum of Natural History, an absolute must for school travel, with its magnificent galleries filled with mammals, fossils, sea creatures, and the amazing Hayden Planetarium.
Walking tours are a favorite for New York City travel, its neighborhoods delightful attractions of their own. Greenwich Village, SoHo, Chinatown, and Little Italy often make the itinerary. A Fifth Avenue Walking Tour takes visitors past landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the New York Public Library. Other fun tours incorporate television and movie sites throughout the city and in Central Park.
Of course, groups have to see New York City from the top with its sentimental observation deck on the Empire State Building and its newer, spacious alternative on Top of the Rock. This deck is located, of course, in Rockefeller Center. And on the other end of Manhattan students can tour the financial district with the World Trade Center rebuilding site or join a cruise to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
With all this, plus parks, gardens, many more museums, favorite restaurants, and hundreds of other attractions familiar from popular culture or delightfully outside of it, New York City is one of the most exciting cities in the world and a perfect choice for school travel and group tours of any age-range or interest.
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