A Guide to Great Field Trips

Kathleen Carroll

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781629149721
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

The world is filled with educational possibilities — use it! This valuable resource explores every aspect of field trips, including their foundation in caring and curiosity, how leaders can establish and achieve sound learning goals, and how to avoid the headaches that too often accompany dozens of children and chaperones unleashed in a new environment. Properly organized, a field trip can provide students with opportunities to develop lifelong learning skills, increase personal responsibility, work cooperatively with others, and expand their worldviews.And field trips need not be full-day affairs to be valuable—even a short "trip" can provide a much richer learning experience than can be found though standard in-class instruction and serve as a welcome break from the weekday routine. A Guide to Great Field Trips outlines more than 200 ideas for valuable trips within the school, around the building and playground, and through the local neighborhood. It even offers ideas for virtual field trips on the Web. Readers can find tips on handling dozens of logistical issues related to field trips, including safety, transportation, permissions, fundraisers, grants, chaperones, meals, and more.

1

Why Take Field Trips?

“We are now at a point where we must educate our children for what no one knew yesterday and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.”

—MARGARET MEAD

Think back to your elementary school days. What do you remember most vividly? If you are like most of us, at least some of those memories are of field trips. These were special days, different from the ordinary routine. As you and your classmates stepped out of the classroom and into the world, your senses were heightened, and your perceptions were indelibly imprinted in your memory.

In this age of standards and accountability, some think that field trips are unnecessary frills. Some say that field trips take away from instruction time, time needed to master standards. But, what does mastering standards mean, anyway? Is mastering standards covering facts and skills for students to bubble in the right answer on a test and then move on to the next set of facts and skills? Or does mastering standards mean leading children beyond a purely two-dimensional world of television, computers, Gameboys, and books, and out into the fresh air? Does mastering standards mean delving into a three-dimensional world of seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching soil, rocks, trees, animals, buildings, beaches, and oceans, working with real issues and learning from real human beings? Does mastering standards mean understanding and remembering concepts, skills, and ways of thinking and relating that will serve students now and as adults? Does mastering standards mean learning how to transfer learning to new situations and use that learning to solve real problems and make meaningful products? If so, then field trips are not frills; they are basics of education. What better way is there for students to master the standards than in conjunction with well-planned field trips?

A Guide to Great Field Trips is designed for teachers, after school and summer program coordinators, faith-based groups, museum educators, homeschoolers, and other families who desire to help children learn with joy in a real-world context and foster the skills to help them thrive in a world of increasing change.

This chapter gives you a rationale to demonstrate to the powers-that-be why field trips are an important aspect of every child’s education. Chapter 1 discusses the many advantages of taking field trips from the perspective of each succeeding section of the book. In addition, an overview of each chapter describes practical guidance on how to make the world the classroom. Use that information to plan safe, successful, and rewarding learning experiences for children.

Field Trips Are Real!

The question is not, “Why take field trips?” but “Why don’t you take field trips?” Field trips bring the world into the classroom. They enable the learners to see things from their own perspective, but also from the perspectives of their peers—thus, broadening and deepening learning.

Field trips are real, not virtual. They enable students to visit places they might never have seen, to see precious artifacts, to hear magnificent music played by symphony orchestras, to sail on the ocean and bring up creatures that reside on the ocean floor, to go from the theoretical to the practical, to have an indelible experience in the learners’ future careers. When a field trip is wisely planned, it can take the travelers back in time (Plimoth Plantation), or up in space (planetarium), or to the ballet, a play, a special event, or to a historic moment.

The field trip can serve as a culminating experience at the end of a course of study, as a catalyst to provoke interest in a new topic, or in the middle of the term for children to test out their ideas and concepts with expert advice from the people they meet at the site.

—Miriam Kronish, principal, Needham, Massachusetts

A Rationale for Chapter 2: The World as the Classroom: Where to Go and What to Do

Chapter 2 provides hundreds of field trip options inside and beyond the local community, in the neighborhood, the schoolyard, the school building, and even in the classroom itself. These field trips connect children to life outside the classroom walls. They broaden the child’s perspectives, informing the child of community resources that are available. In addition, these varied field trips may enrich the child with lifelong interests and new possibilities for future careers.

Connect Children to Life

Ellen Bauman, a 25-year veteran first grade teacher in Rockville, Maryland, was the one who told me that the little children she teaches now are living in a two-dimensional world.

When you read a book to a child and you say, “Remember when you went to the zoo?” they have no idea what you are talking about. They don’t even know about wild animals, except as pictures from books; they have no sense of the size. Many of these children don’t experience anything except through TV and pictures. They don’t see expanses such as a real live beach. I try to help them understand by telling them that the beach is like a huge sandbox with no edges. It’s amazing how little knowledge kids have of the world. The parents often work two jobs and the children stay inside. When I ask, “What did you do on this beautiful weekend we just had?” their answer is “I watched TV.” There is no immersion in the world. There is just watching, no feeling for the world around them. Everything is two-dimensional; life is two-dimensional. As a result, they have lost the ability to ask questions. If the rare child does come up with a question, it is often discouraged because that question doesn’t matter. It isn’t on the test.

Author and CEO Randy White of Kansas City, Missouri, quotes research that backs up Ellen Bauman’s observations. In an article about the relationship between children and nature (2005), he speaks of “children’s extinction of experience.” Research that Randy White has compiled shows that:

Children today have few opportunities for free play and regular contact with the natural world. Their physical boundaries have shrunk (Devereaux 1991, Kyttä 2004) due to a number of factors. A “culture of fear” has parents afraid for their children’s safety. Due to “stranger danger,” many children are no longer free to roam their neighborhoods or even their own yards unless accompanied by adults (Pyle 2002, Herrington and Studtmann 1998, Moore and Wong 1997). Many working families can’t supervise their children after school, giving rise to latchkey children who stay indoors or attend supervised afterschool activities. Furthermore, children’s lives have become structured and scheduled by adults, who hold the mistaken belief that this sport or that lesson will make their children more successful as adults (Moore and Wong 1997, White and Stoecklin 1998). The culture of childhood that played outside is gone and children’s everyday life has shifted to the indoors (Hart 1999, Moore 2004). One researcher has gone so far as to refer to this sudden shift in children’s lives and their loss of free play in the outdoors as a “childhood of imprisonment” (Devereaux 1991).

Randy White states further that, “With children’s access to the natural world becoming increasingly limited, schools, where children spend 40 to 50 hours per week, may be mankind’s last opportunity to reconnect children with the natural world and create a future generation that values and preserves nature” (Herrington and Studtmann 1998, Malone and Tranter 2003).

Randy White’s focus is to have students go outside and learn in their own schoolyard. Chapter 2 of this book provides many suggestions for using the schoolyard for learning. But White’s research is relevant to any field trips to natural settings. His article also quotes research indicating the following:

Children with symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are better able to concentrate after contact with nature (Taylor 2001).

Children with views of and contact with nature score higher on tests of concentration and self-discipline. The more exposure to nature, the better the scores (Wells 2000, Taylor 2002).

Children who play regularly in natural environments show more advanced motor fitness, including coordination, balance, and agility, and they are sick less often (Grahn et al.1997, Fjortoft 2001).

When children play in natural environments, their play is more diverse with imaginative and creative play that fosters language and collaborative skills (Moore and Wong 1997, Taylor et al.1998, Fjortoft and Sageie 2000).

Exposure to natural environments improves children’s cognitive development by improving their awareness, reasoning, and observational skills (Pyle 2002).

Nature buffers the impact of life stress on children and helps them deal with adversity. The greater the amount of nature exposure, the greater the benefits (Wells 2003).

Play in a diverse natural environment reduces or eliminates bullying (Malone and Tranter 2003).

Nature helps children develop powers of observation and creativity and instills a sense of peace and being at one with the world (Crain 2001).

Children who play in nature have more positive feelings about one another (Moore 1996).

Natural environments stimulate social interaction among children (Moore 1986, Bixler, Floyd, and Hammutt 2002).

Outdoor environments are important to children’s development of independence and autonomy (Bartlett 1996).

This research is not presented as an argument against the world of technology. Chapter 2 also has a section on virtual field trips and teleconferencing and covers how to use the Internet to take children to the Louvre in Paris to see da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. It describes how students were able to follow a young American’s solo trip to the North Pole and speak with him directly when he arrived there, using the Internet and other technologies. But children also need to get out into the world and have some firsthand experiences using their own senses; they need to encounter some three-dimensional space!

There are very exciting learning experiences that combine real-world field trips with technology described in chapter 4. For instance, students might use the Internet to prepare for the field trip. They record their experiences with tools such as digital cameras and videos. Then they employ a variety of innovative technologies, such as podcasts, classroom blogs, and photo-sharing sites, to communicate their learning to family, friends, and other schools around the world. On the other hand, there are museums that combine real artifacts along with their teleconferences. North Carolina’s Museum of Natural Sciences program, for instance, encourages students to learn through their senses by mailing schools boxes of artifacts, such as spices from the rainforest or shells from the coast, in line with the teleconferences they present.

Technology is a powerful tool to enhance student learning. The mistake is when...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Why Take Field Trips?
• 2 The World as the Classroom: Where to Go and What to Do
• 3 Caring and Curiosity: The Foundations of Field Trips
• 4 Field Trips Are for Learning!
• 5 Handling Logistics: A Field Trip Essential
• Acknowledgments
• Index