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All material is my personal opinion, and not that of any other organization. Copyright 2001. Permission is granted for individual teacher use. All rights reserved. |
 Field trips are a lot of work, but they are a magical opportunity for learning. They touch students in a way we cannot through regular classroom instruction. I am going to give you advice and options, and examples from the field trips I organized this year. Step One: Choose your destination.
Step Two: Make sure you follow proper procedures. Get your principal's approval, and file your paperwork in accordance with your district's requirements. Get your bus lined up and your reservations confirmed before you even tell students about the trip. Step Three: Visit yourself ahead of time. This is a chance to discover the place for yourself, so you can prepare your students. Think about where you will eat lunch and other details. Investigate that which your students will be investigating. This will help with Step Four. For a trip to the tide pools, be sure to find out when there will be a low tide. Step Four: Recruit parents or other adults to be guides. Students work much better if they are in smaller groups. Send a letter home asking for volunteers at least two weeks in advance. Attach it to your permission slip and require it to be turned in at least a week prior to the trip. Phone the volunteers to confirm in advance. More adults will give you, the teacher, more flexibility, allowing you to move from group to group. Bring a camera to record the event. Step Five: Introduce your students to the area before you go. Study the ecosystem, the animals and the conditions to which they are adapted. To prepare for a trip this Spring to the tidepools, I brought a large bucket of marine organisms that I scraped off a dock. Students used the tide pool field guide to identify mussels, crabs and isopods, many of the same animals they would find at the tide pool. I gave them journals to record their observations in, and brought those journals for them to take notes in on the field trip. Step Six: Develop a schedule of activities for the field trip. Students need to be accountable for actually working, even if it is as simple as finding a certain number of animals. Make it very clear when and where lunch is, and when and where you will meet to leave. Review the schedule in class before the trip, and have copies for the students on the day of the trip. Step Seven: Prepare a set of Field Trip Rules, in the form of a behavior contract. Review this prior to the trip and require students to sign it as a condition of going. You do not have to take every student. Explain to the class in advance that good citizenship is a prerequisite to going on the trip. If you do not feel a student will behave responsibly, do not bring him or her. Step Eight: Assign groups in advance. Then when you arrive at your destination, you can announce the assignments and get everyone quickly into balanced groups. Step Nine: Be flexible in the field. The kids may be having an incredible experience just discovering the bounty before them. Do not try to replicate a classroom environment -- that is an insult to the space you are in. I found that though I had a number of structured activities planned, the only one that really worked at the tide pools was finding and identifying as many creatures as we could. The kids were so stimulated by the environment and what they were discovering, I could not bring myself to force them to sit down and count waves. Step Ten: Extend and deepen the experience when you return to the classroom. Have students write about what they discovered. Use photographs, video or their notes to bring the experience back into the class. I used detailed photographs I took to have students write what became an online Tide Pool Field Guide. Using the web is only one way for students to publish their writing for a wider audience. Students could make their own books or posters. Your school's Open House could feature students explaining a hands-on display of dock creatures, as ours did in May.
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