Leave No Child Inside – The Importance of Field Trips

Field trips enrich and expand the curriculum, strengthen observation skills by immersing children into sensory activities, increase children’s knowledge in a particular subject area and expand children’s awareness of their own community. And everyone you speak with has a field trip memory.

Field trips are important because it gives students a chance to learn hands on. Also, traveling will give them a chance to see different places and learn new things up close and personal. Field trips are good learning tools which many schools participate in.

What makes a field trip good?
Think of the excursion as a field study, not a field trip. It is a learning experience or experiential learning.
A focus on  integration and project-based learning teaches students to explore real-world problems and challenges. Active and engaged learning inspires students to obtain a deeper knowledge of the subjects they are studying and allows them to see how ideas are connected. Teaching in such a contextual manner promotes collaboration, critical thinking and knowledge retention.
Often teachers look to the arts and cultural organizations of their community for field trip ideas: museums, zoos, science centers, and natural areas. Performing arts bring the page to the stage and can also offer a lesson in theater etiquette.
In addition to the traditional venues, teachers may choose sites for real world experiences to encourage students to apply what they’ve learned to something relevant in their life. For example, children visiting a construction site can return to the classroom and design their own homes, businesses, and other architectural structures.
Visiting a college or university campus introduces the dream of higher education; college students can act as the tour guides, show dorm rooms, cafeterias, and study halls, while providing mentorship to the younger student.
The best field trips can bring two seemingly unrelated worlds together.
Children from large cities may not understand a math equation about livestock, crops, and the other staples of the rural experience because the students focus on the vocabulary, get confused, and skip the question.
A well-designed field trip can bring it all together: combine two or more subjects while offering a variety of learning styles and intelligences, integrate the arts, encourage low-income and English language learner students to make connections between community resources and opportunities and their family and culture.
These experiences allow all participating students to achieve a higher academic performance in all subject areas.
Kids need this vital component of school instruction, if not only to improve test scores, but to feel, see, touch, and even taste the real world around them. And that’s something you can only get from a field trip.

  Benefits of Educational Field Trips    

  Educational Trips play an important role in the curriculum as a vehicle for sensory experiences such as smelling the air, listening to the sounds and talking about things they have seen or have not seen before.  

  Trips are designed to enhance learning and to broaden children's horizons as well as their perspectives. Providing them with first hand experience about things around them in their natural environment.    

  Family field trips also provide opportunity for parents to participate in the kindergarten program and to catch up with teachers and other families.

The Importance of Field Trips  

  * Reinforcement information that children learn in the classroom.

  * Help children interact with what they are learning.

  * Serve as a powerful motivator and are considered fun, for children.

  * Extension of classroom study

  * Provide opportunity to work together cooperatively with others.

  * Provide experiences that cannot be duplicated in the school

 * Broadening vision of cultural diversity 

  * Provide real-life context for the material being learned

  * Remember better through experiences

  * Allow children to touch and manipulate the material about which they are  learning.