Field Trips Are Learning Experiences

As the government continues to place more emphasis on testing and accountability in the classroom, less emphasis is placed on learning and growing as an individual. Students are no longer allowed the opportunity to experience things that are not listed in the standard course of study and are expected to learn everything within the four walls of a classroom. Cuts in school and classroom funding have limited what resources are available to students. At South Davidson Middle School, we like to think outside of the box and our teaching is not confined to just the classroom. That is why we take our 8th graders on a field study to Wilmington each fall. This field study is not your typical field trip in which the students go off for a few hours to visit a new place and have no idea how it connects to what they are studying. Our field study begins early on in the semester. We begin introducing the field study the first day of school by talking about where we are going and how it relates to what we will be studying over the course of the year. Incorporated into the study are math, science, social studies, language arts, and technology. By the end of the fall semester, students can explain in detail how the field study is related to the content they have learned in the 8th grade.

Our day begins at 5:00 am with students arriving to school to eat breakfast and load the buses for our adventure to Wilmington. Students are often excited and have slept very few hours when they arrive at school. After 5 hours of traveling, we arrive at the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. A majority of our students have never been to an aquarium and do not exactly know what to expect. Here they are allowed to observe alligators, seahorses, jellyfish, and other items on exhibit. After we visit the aquarium, we move on to Fort Fisher and learn how the fort was instrumental during the Civil War. This visit allows them to see with their own eyes what we have been studying in the classroom and provides then with a better understanding.

Once we leave Ft. Fisher, we take the students to a public beach for 30-45 minutes. One would think that most, if not all of our students have visited the beach, but they have not. Usually we have around 10-15 students who have never visited the beach. The look on their faces and in their eyes when they see the beach for the first time is priceless. This makes all of the planning and hard work for this trip worth it! When our time is up at the beach, we then drive into Wilmington and visit the Battleship USS North Carolina. Here they learn about the battleship and what technology was used when the battleship was in operation during WWII. After our visit at the battleship is over, we begin our long journey home and arrive back at school around 10:00 pm.

In the following weeks after the field study, our students design a newsletter in which they write brief articles that describe their experiences during the field study and explain what they learned about the different sites we visited. The students are also allowed to use 2-3 pictures they took while in Wilmington and place them in their newsletters. Once the newsletters are scored, students are given the newsletters back so they can keep them as a memento of the trip. Students thoroughly enjoy going to Wilmington and it is an experience that they talk about all year long.

Field studies are an important part of learning. Students are allowed to see and experience things that they may not normally do in their everyday lives. As the government continues to cut spending on education, it is necessary that we, as teachers, rally for our students and find every opportunity to expose our students to experiences that they can learn from and that they will never forget.