With schools across the country cutting their budgets, field trips are vanishing due to lack of funding. According to the American Association of School Administrators, 51 percent of schools reported cutting field trips in the 2010-2011 school year.
Some people may not find this fact disturbing, but it is. Field trips are beneficial to students for a variety of reasons, from hands-on experience to making learning fun to creating enjoyable memories.
We found a blog post written by Alyx Kellington, who managed a grant program, Building Learning Communities through Arts and Culture, that fostered arts integration in 6th grade social studies classrooms. Kellington makes the case for field trips by saying they enrich and expand curriculum, strengthen observational skills by immersing children in sensory activities, increase children’s knowledge in particular subject areas and expand children’s awareness of their own community.
She also points out that many children may not make the connection between a concept learned in the classroom and its implementation in the world outside the school until they see it or experience it on a field trip.
Even though it’s tough to find funding for trips in recent years, we believe these learning experiences are invaluable to children! Call us if you have questions about planning a trip; we’ll do our best to help you devise a plan to make a field trip possible.