Effective Teachers Incorporate Field Trips into Their Lessons

http://langwitches.org/blog/2009/04/14/what-is-in-a-fieldtrip/

Field trips are a great way to elaborate on the curriculum being taught in the classroom. Effective teachers often plan meaningful field trips for their students so they can put into context what they were learning in the classroom.

I found an article about Creating Effective Field Trips. The article stated that field trips can help to:

• be an extension of content taught in the classroom
• a way for students to learn material in another manner (kinestheticaly)
• create a shared reference that can be used later for other class discussions related to other subject areas.
• allows students and teacher to bond in a different environment outside of the classroom

In order for the field trip to be effective and correlate with what was being taught in the classroom, the teacher needs to decide what the objective is for the field trip (what he/she wants the students to take away from the trip). Sometimes its nice to have a lesson that goes a long with the field trip; something that the students work on while on the trip so they have something concrete to bring back to the classroom.

Reflection on the field trip is always important to do when you get back to school or the next day. A teacher can include a follow up activity to do in class to discuss what the students learned on the field trip and how it related to what they were learning in class. They could create a graphic organizer to organize the information they got from both the field trip and the classroom. As long as the field trip is relevant to what the students are learning in the classroom with regards to science, it can really play a huge role in the students understanding of the content. So as a teacher, make sure you have do plan some field trips because if they are planned properly, the students really do learn a lot from it and retain the information.