Field Trip in the Early Years: Learning in & from the Real World
In order to promote effective and active learning we give our Early Years Learners experiences that make learning visible beyond the classroom by organizing field trips. Field trips help develop comprehension, understand concepts, and extend knowledge related to the unit. It helps young learners to build on life skills, attitudes and values that help them drive their learning in real life spaces and places.
Nursery
We at Edubridge are looking forward to making learning enduring and memorable for our children. Keeping in mind the Central Idea of our unit ‘Play is an opportunity to grow and connect with others’. We planned some experiential learning opportunities for the students to give them some real-world experiences to make learning more engaging and meaningful.
We organized some field trips for our Nursery dolphins. They visited an indoor play area ‘Yaya Playhouse’ for an indoor play experience and also a great learning experience to be outdoors to explore play at the ‘Priyadarshini Park’ in collaboration with our PE team. Through these field trips students developed their understanding about our line of inquiry, ways we play and building positive relationships through play. With a focus of developing our Communication and Social skills These field trips helped the Nursery Dolphins to collaborate with the community and take come valuable reflections to the classroom which they documented using the visual thinking routine of a Venn diagram.
Junior Kindergarten :
Jr.KG was inquiring into the transdisciplinary theme ‘How we express ourselves’ through which they were exploring the unit on Stories.
We were trying to deepen their understanding of the
– Form of stories
– Where we find stories
– How stories are shared
We went for a field trip to Crossword Bookstore where we explored different kinds of books and made connections to our understanding of how authors create stories and make books for people to know their stories.
We further got an understanding of how there are books for all age groups and also there are books in different languages. We engaged in a story read aloud in English and Bengali language.
We came back to school empowered with knowledge of various books and stories and this trip helped us increase our love for reading books.
Senior Kindergarten :
To provide learners with experiences outside their everyday activities, Senior Kindergarten students went on a field trip to the Pahelvi bakery which is a factory that bakes honeybell cakes. As a part of the second unit of inquiry- ‘How we organize ourselves’, students and teachers of Senior KG got a first hand experience to observe the making of honeybell cakes.
The objective of this field trip was to make learners understand that everything works in a systematic way. There are rules that need to be followed by everyone. They observed how every machine had its own objective and it was part of a system. If one of them was removed, the cakes wouldn’t be available to us.
The students displayed excellent communication skills as well as self management skills. They shared their understanding of a system and set of rules and in turn gained some knowledge and understanding of the working of the factory. They also made sure to take care of themselves and be mindful of the huge machines around, which was agreed upon as Essential Agreements by all.
We came back to school with sweet memories and of course the freshly baked honey bell cakes! The learners summarized their understanding of how systems work through a mind map.
