Field Trips

Natural Science Museum

Teacher created long term project.

This experience provided students exposure to a variety of career paths and hands on science experimentation and learning. Jobs students were exposed to included museum curator, astronomer, engineer, technology development, archeologist, and anthropologist. The experiment allowed students to explore science state standards, including rotations versus orbits and how seasons occur. This will have a lifelong benefit of giving vision to their education and how it leads to career. This field trip also provided STEM exposure to previously unknown topics and fields, thus enabling college and career awareness.

Reflection

Scroll through student reflection and overall takeaways.

Visiting the Houston Museum of Natural Science opened my eyes to many things. One major takeaway was the lack of schema or background knowledge students had prior about critical science standards. This experience gave them hands on learning to many topics of study. Students showed outward signs of joy when experiencing the hands on STEM learning and seasonal instruction. Moving forward, I want to make a more deliberate effort to imbed science into our reading and spiral career discussion into our lessons to remind of what was learned at the museum.

Career readiness is a critical aspect of developing a well rounded individual and begins with awareness. This awareness is currently lacking on the elementary level on my campus. In order to provide my students and their families with a variety of exposure to unique learning experiences that enrich future careers, I sought out a learning opportunity that would meet this need. The Children's Museum of Houston offers an overnight field trip to girls focusing on STEM and career-readiness.

This gives students exposure to experts and career connections in an interactive and unique way. After coordinating with my team, the application was sent in and eventually accepted. The opportunity is available to campuses bi-annually and requires application and logistic coordination for food and transportation. The facility is open to students after hours, and planned to sleep among the interactive exhibits. At this visit students planned to engage with a variety of hands on science and engineering activities such as airplane creation and circuit work. Additionally, the museum has a "mock city" with interactive jobs at city hall, the police station, a restaurant, vet clinic, and bank. This exposure provides students with greater awareness to future careers and opens eyes to additional purpose in education.

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This visit was scheduled to be on April 3rd. Due to COVID-19, The Children's Museum cancelled the trip. Prior to this decision, I had conducted the distribution and communication of the event to students and their families. Permission slips, media release forms, medical release forms, and emergency contact forms were sent out and returned to teachers. The experience accepts the first thirty girls to send in their forms, and we had seventeen girls already turn in all four of their forms.

Attached is the form distributed and examples of completed forms.

I would have liked to include photographs and videos of students interacting with the career exhibits and experts. This would have looked like students experiencing the interactive community zone consisting of a mock bank, restaurant, grocery store, veterinarian clinic, hospital, police car and precinct. These artifacts would have displayed student exposure to programming that enriches their exposure to career opportunities and STEM experimentation unavailable on campus. The visitors get to assume the roles of workers in these varying environments. This exposure gives students the chance to see themselves in a wide range of roles for their future careers. They can be the bank teller providing loans or the veterinarian healing sick animals. They can shop for food or be cashiers at the grocery store. They can be the chef in the restaurant or the customer.

Artifacts of interaction with experts would have shown video evidence of students questioning experts. Conversations with people creates relationships that can open doors to them in the future. This would also demonstrate meaningful learning as they seek the answers to their own wondering. The experts assist in the STEM exhibit of the experience. Students engage with a hands on experiment and self guided inquiry for engineering. In past visits, students interacted with creating their own designs for "an item that flies" when launched from a multitude of materials provided by the museum. Some created a hot air balloon style, while other developed planes. This experience allows students to create and experiment to solve a problem. The impact of this learning would expose females to the field of STEM and provide schema in fields previously not encountered.

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Entrance to The Natural Science Museum and Planetarium

In the state of Texas in fourth grade, students are only assessed in Reading, Mathematics, and Writing. Unfortunately because of this, science and social studies content subjects fall by the wayside. Because of this reality, I noticed a serious need to incorporate cross disciplinary learning. I incorporate science objectives and learning into our daily reading block through our text selections. In addition to cross-disciplinary learning, field trips serve to support science learning. Most recently students had hands on learning at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. In preparation for our visit to the Natural Science museum- including the Planetarium- students navigated a self-conducted planet study. They were given the choice of any planet and a rubric.

In preparation for the visit, our class read multiple informational texts about space. In particular, our learning in class revolved around a planet study for our Planetarium visit. This is connected to the Natural Science museum in that reading is supporting science standards. In class, students selected a planet and included varying reading text features to further inform their readers about their selected planet.