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After the Field Trip

Field trips are fun experiences that can become more memorable through art. Students will document and illustrate their experiences from a recent field trip.

Lesson Plan

Supplies Needed

Gather all the supplies needed to bring your craft ideas to life! From paints and markers to glue and scissors, our crafts section has everything to spark creativity and make every project truly special.

  • Paper

Steps

  • Step 1

    With children, plan a trip outside the classroom—around the block to study architectural materials, to an art or science museum, or perhaps to a farm, for example. Involve children in making as many of the arrangements as possible.

  • Step 2

    On the day of the event, make sure each child has white paper and Crayola® Colored Pencils. Ask children to pick at least three important things about their experience, such as transportation, what they heard a docent present, or plants they saw growing. Encourage them to take notes and/or make sketches to help them remember what they did, heard, and/or saw. Write the times for each event.

  • Step 3

    Upon returning to the classroom, ask children to work in small groups to more fully document their experience in a group book. Remind them that each book will be most complete if it contains “chapters” about trip planning, travel, what they did/saw/who they talked with at the site, and their most memorable experiences.

  • Step 4

    Children work together to organize their book and decide who will complete each page. They use Crayola Markers and Colored Pencils to document their experiences with words and representations.

  • Step 5

    Groups present their books to each other. Which details did everyone record? Which memories were unique to one group?

Standards

LA: Write narratives in which they recount two or more appropriately sequenced events, include some details regarding what happened, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide some sense of closure.

VA: Students will initiate making works of art and design by experimenting, imagining and identifying content.

VA: Students will investigate, plan and work through materials and ideas to make works of art and design.

LA: Participate in shared research and writing projects.

LA: With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.

LA: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade level topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.

MATH: Tell and write time.

MATH: Represent and interpret data.

SS: Demonstrate an understanding that different people may describe the same event or situation in diverse ways, citing reasons for the differences in views.

SS: Construct and use mental maps of locales, regions, and the world that demonstrate understanding of relative location, direction, size, and shape.

SS: Describe how people create places that reflect ideas, personality, culture, and wants and needs as they design homes, playgrounds, classrooms, and the like.

Adaptations

In preparation, ask a representative of the site (firefighter, zoologist, docent) to talk with the children beforehand about what they will discover on their trip. If possible, meet with that person at the end of the event to recap children’s learning.

Ask adult family members to accompany the children, and to keep their own notebooks. These volunteers can then work with small groups of children to complete their books.

Use digital notebooks to take photos and make notes. Add pictures of children’s original artwork. Compile a digital book. Publish it online!

Children create dioramas or replicas of the site visited. Offer a variety of recycled and craft materials to enable them to represent details.