You’ve seen the phrase attached to many movies: “based on a true story.” Actors play up characters and dramatize scenes, but the true story essentially is intact.

One of those real-life-turned-movie tales was the story of a 2-month-old beached bottlenose dolphin found in 2005 off the east coast of Florida. She was entangled in a crab trap and couldn’t swim. Rescuers named her Winter, and she was taken to Clearwater Marine Aquarium for rehabilitation. Her tail eventually fell off, but Winter learned to swim side to side (like a fish) instead of up and down. The team outfitted Winter with a prosthetic tail, which allows her to swim like a normal dolphin.

Sounds like a great storyline for a movie, and Dolphin Tale was released Sept. 23, opening No. 1 at the box office. The movie trailer states “inspired by the amazing true story” and promos continue with “In an inspiring story of the bond between animals and humans, a boy named Sawyer discovers an injured dolphin…”

So, after touring the aquarium and a nearby movie attraction display on Tuesday, we wondered why none of the exhibits showed anything about the boy who discovered Winter, developed an emotional friendship and often swam with Winter as she rehabbed, all key points of the movie. Who was he?

“There was no boy,” an employee bluntly said.

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Budget cuts impacting public schools in Florida all but ended field trips in Lee County, which are few and far between. Rather than waste the two-week winter break with cartoons, coloring books and boredom, we packed up the car and took a family road/field trip to Atlanta.

Lesson No. 1: A child born and raised in Florida needs instruction on how to put on a winter glove. You’d be surprised at how tough it is for a 5-year-old boy to place five fingers into five separate parts of a glove.

Much like a teacher makes field trips educational, I dissected activities of our trip and broke them down into classroom subjects. It’s something any parent can do, whether it’s a trip to Georgia or a trip to the grocery store. Learning doesn’t have to stop just because the school calendar says class is not in session.

Below is an educational analysis of our trip. We’ll start with history.

Social studies: The Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. The sprawling complex is just a few blocks southeast of downtown Atlanta, and is as much about MLK as civil rights in general. The highlight is a ranger-led tour of MLK Jr.’s birth home, where he lived until age 12. It was a little difficult explaining MLK’s impact to a child, who couldn’t quite grasp that people were treated different just because of their skin color.

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