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| Pantages Theater |
With limited budgets, field trips have gone by the wayside in many schools. This was the first field trip for many of the third grade children who participated. Many who live only thirty minutes from the theater had never been to downtown Tacoma.
In our attempt to focus on reading skills we have lost the important understanding that children cannot read what they do not understand due to lack of background experiences. Without this field trip, reading about attending a play would be meaningless to most of these children.
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| Stinky Cheese Man |
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| What They Liked! |
With these ideas in mind, they choose which they liked best, the play or the book, and completed a writing prompt in which they had to support their choice with three reasons. Enjoy some of the results below!
Teacher efficiency was aided by technology on this day! The students wrote on their iPads, AirDropped their papers to the teacher, checked them and then sent them to the printer while they drew their pictures. Before the end of the day, they were all displayed in the hallway!
Virtual field trips have been a way to give students virtual experiences when funding is not available, or the experience is unavailable locally. Discovery Education has a great searchable resource! Technology provides experiences through this venue that are unimaginable! Despite this, my experience with these children on this day and seeing the results in these artifacts were convincing proof for me that we should do everything we can to get children out of the classroom!
Want to help a class go on a field trip? Go to the education page at GoFundMe and search "field trip" and you can choose between the 1,304 options! Yes, teachers are trying to get students out of the classroom for field trips!
Janyne,
ReplyDeleteI love this idea of preparing students for a field trip and then after the trip debriefing students in this way. So Cool! and this field trip sounds like so much fun! I remember in Art and Music Methods we talked about taking virtual field trips with are classroom like listening to concerts. I love the idea of taking our classrooms on field trips, virtual or real. It's great to expose students to things they might not get to otherwise experience.
Janyne,
ReplyDeleteI think the AirDrop feature is really neat. How convenient that the students' work would be displayed by the end of the day! I feel like when I am a teacher I will probably forget to put up student work at all! (yikes) But luckily, technology like this exists and it didn't seem like it would take much extra time out of the teacher's schedule.
Janyne,
ReplyDeleteFor our science methods class last semester we took a field trip to the salt mines in Hutch with a home school group from Wichita. While we were preparing for the trip we talked about all the things that a teacher has to do in preparation for a field trip. Last semester I also created a Latin America thematic unit and I put a virtual field trip to El Salvador. That is a good way to help kids experience things in the world without having the hassle of dealing with all the paperwork and such of a class field trip.
I love that these students were able to have that experience. I remember going to a play in elementary school. It was one of the books we were reading and the experience made the book and all the activities we did wight he book much more engaging and exciting for us. It is important for students to be able to spend time outside of the classroom learning through experiences like this.
ReplyDeleteJanyne,
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for this post! Lately, I've been getting really frustrated with all the technical and admin-types of work that is a never-ending part of a teacher's routine. This post reminded me that learning (and teaching) has fun times, too! Reading it made me remember when my school went on a field trip to a play (also of a book we had read as a class). It was so much fun--and I still remember it!
My favorite part of your blog was when you said: "In our attempt to focus on reading skills we have lost the important understanding that children cannot read what they do not understand due to lack of background experiences. Without this field trip, reading about attending a play would be meaningless to most of these children."
Even for those who don't see the "point" of simply having fun, this gives a reason to have out-of-the-classroom experiences for students. I'll have to tuck that away for later! ;)
Thanks again! :)