What is in a Field Trip?
The highlight of a school year for many kids is a field trip. They are off with their classmates to explore, experience and break away from the daily classroom routine.
image by somenametoforget
Last year, about the same time, I wrote a blog post on the same topic Field trips-An Elementary School Favorite.
Unfortunately, it seems that many times a field trip is just allowing the kids to run wild, take a break, and in the best case scenario experience something different for a few hours. The best field trip was when the learning in the classroom can connect with these new experiences and then translate back to future connections in the school.
I still feel the same way about field trips. Too many times, the excursion has been done too many years in a row. It became “just one more thing” that is just done. The reason why it was incorporated into the first place has been lost.
I titled this blog post: What is in a Field Trip? The answer should be LEARNING! The reasons should include:
- an integral part of the broader curriculum
- extending learning beyond the classroom
- learning through hands on activities
- taking learning off the page
- building a learning community
- connecting it back to learning in the classroom.
Ask yourself, if every field trip you are taking your students on is a learning opportunity that connects back to past/future lessons in the classroom in some way?
So how can you make a field trip a LEARNING trip? What do you want your students to get out of the experience? Take these skills and look for connections you can create, emphasize, incorporate, and highlight? What other subject areas can you connect to?
Credit for middle image “experience” by tombodor
Look for learning opportunities BEFORE and AFTER the field trip that challenge students to prepare what they will see, but also to pull from the experience that they had?
Don’t let the experience stand in isolation.
Here are some concrete activities that you can prepare. Yes, it will take prep time and creativity 
. That is why good teaching is an ART FORM.
Gail Lovely gives the following advice:
I make field trips learning trips by framing the event in learning before and after – & give them something to do while there! [It]could be sketches, interviews, photos, puzzles to solve, scavenger hunts, something other than “just going”
classroomqueen contributes:
I used VoiceThread for documenting project [to] show student learning & reflection
Lucy Gray pointed me to the Apple Learning Interchange projects “FieldTrip 2.0”
As students observe their world in creative ways, they can utilize technology to record their explorations. They publish what they have seen and learned so that others can collaborate with them and share experiences. This engaging and active processing encourages deeper understanding of the shared experience.
Activating “prior knowledge” and “pre-viewing” are teaching strategies used to engage students and greatly enhance learning.
Pre-Activitites
- Google Earth
- Google Maps
- K-W-L
- Video Conferencing
During Trip
- Geocaching
- Digital and/or Video Photography
- Scavenger Hunt
- Audio Recordings
Post Activities
- Create Digital Field Guides
- Analyze Photos for Details
- Create Narrated Slideshows, Movies, or Podcasts
- Comic Strips
On Field trips-An Elementary School Favorite I wrote about using
- the AlphaSmart Neo , a handy portable word processing keyboard, to allow students to document their field trip
- Using cell phones to call in and record audio commentaries (ex. K7.net)
- MP3 recorder to create live sound seeing tours
Here are some other ideas to make learning connections:
- How about using Google Monster Milk Truck to allow students to “zoom” around the area you will be visiting?
- Geocaching activities with an iPhone
I am working on a Google Earth Scavenger hunt as a pre-activity for our 3rd graders before they go on a bus tour around our city. A blog post about creating and using Google Earth is coming up.
How have YOU made a field trip all about LEARNING? What kind of creative ways have you found to activate, experience and reflect with your students?
Hi Silvia,
The link to Monster Milktruck is broken. I suspect it needed an http in front of it.
Good work here on the post, I am going to explore some of these ideas!
Chris
Next year when possible teachers are going to visit outside field trips with geocaching equipment ahead to time.
On the field trip student groups will have written questions with Long/lat instead of numbers, map, voice recorder (MP3 hopefully) and cameras.
At each stop, students will record observations both with the voice recorder and by photography and video. (Many places now ban writing instruments due to vandalism).
Then the photographs, and voice recordings will be edited and added to to create a movie for the rest of the school.
We were going to do it this year but Ike messed up our year and caused all field trips to be canceled to help make up days.
This past fall we created “virtual” trips for schools that could never consider visiting our destination in person. With all the tech available, I would love it for a class reading Moby Dick to give us a ring and order a virtual field trip of Old Mystic Village, or have other classes that study 19th Century US History to ask us to create a virtual field trip of Old Sturbridge Village for them after we visit. It really helped keep my kids focused on purpose and audience when they were there visiting. Of course, nothing is as motivational as creating a product for an authentic pre-determined audience.
What is in a field trip?
Learning…and sharing what you learned with others.
Last year was the first time I really tried to turn a field trip into a LEARNING trip. It came upon listening to an episode of Dan Schmit’s Kidcast Podcast and blog post, Podcasting and Field Trips, http://www.intelligenic.com/blog/?p=126 . While the podcasting didn’t turn out too great, it was extremely windy that day, we did come up with something else. Myself, two parents, and the kids, took a load of pictures throughout the day. When we came back we compiled them all, removed one’s that were very similar, but then divided the rest among ourselves. We used PhotoStory to created a slideshow with narration and posted it online, I created a wiki page for the trip, http://millfest.wikispaces.com/ . You will also find there out attempts at podcasts (another issue was the district proxy not allowing us to upload the audio files to GCast), and one students essay.
Did it make for work? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes. It was one of the first times I actually saw the majority of students engaged in the field trip the majority of the time. Plus, they felt super-cool walking around with digital cameras and mp3 players. I can’t wait for this year, now I have a Flip (maybe even two).
Also, on our last Science Day Camp I streamed the majority of the day via Mogulus. My idea was that parents could tune in and see what their kids were up to, as well as anyone else. While this won’t work for every field trip it might for some. Thanks for the great post, will be forwarding to the teachers in my school.
[...] What is in a Field Trip? [...]
Thanks for the wonderful ideas both from your original post and the comments by the teachers. While I don’t have a field trip coming up until the end of May our Year 5/Grade4 students are going on a Chinese Culture field trip in a couple of weeks to the Temple of Heaven.
Basically, I don’t have any control over what happens on these trips as I am there as crowd control but as I read your email I got really excited and started talking to my Chinese co-teacher of how we could incorporate some of the ideas into this trip. She got excited also and will be sharing with the other teachers in the Year Level.
We (Our Class) will definitely due a Voice Thread as it is technology our class is familiar with using and I may even try a podcast as this was one of my goals for this year.
I will let you know how it all works out. I may also try to put a wiki together for this also.
Again, not my trip but it got me thinking. Thanks
I guess I should mention that I teach in Beijing so we will be doing an actual trip to the Temple of Heaven not a virtual one.
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