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. Students might be good at reciting and remembering things, but they often don’t make the connection unless they experience it firsthand. Field trips connect the dots for students by providing real experiences related to all content areas. For the geckos to gain the greatest benefit from field trips, we, facilitators, have chosen thoughtfully to take our geckos on a field trip to the construction site at our Kollur campus. This was the perfect time for our geckos to interact with the site engineers and people working on the construction site. In addition to this the facilitators prepared the geckos by reviewing and rehearsing the safety precautions and the buddy system.

The construction engineers who were working for our school project were kind enough to speak to our geckos and explained to them the materials used in the construction. During the field trip our geckos had a blast asking questions like “what are these small rocks?” “How can it help us to build a house?” “Where do we get this material from?” “What is this green soft sand?”

Our geckos were astounded to see the construction material which was displayed for our field trip. The geckos were amazed to look at all the machines used in the construction site.

Visiting this construction site opened the door of dream to become a construction engineer as some of the geckos said that they want to build big malls, houses, schools and towers when they grow up.

After the field trip our geckos became knowledgeable about the materials and tools used for construction and brought in lot of class room discussions. It was evident that they made the connection with the unit of inquiry through this experience. They drew beautiful reflections which spoke much more about this field trip.

Learning Outcome: Our geckos thoroughly enjoyed the session and became knowledgeable about the different materials and tools used for construction. They also understood the importance of these materials in construction of a house.

 

Some highlights: