The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

     Yes indeed, today was field trip day. Aside from the usual loudness on the bus, the trip was a fun time for all. More importantly, it was quite educational. We went to the Sandy Creek Nature Center to build on our past unit of micro-organisms and our current unit of macro-organisms. Our class began the day inside where we got to have a short lecture about micro-organisms, and then break into groups and do centers. I was quite happy with how we impressed the person leading the lecture with our ability to accurately answer her questions that she had not given us the answers to. The students did an exceptional job with the centers as well. There were five centers: Dissecting microscopes, cause and effect sort, two different microscope stations where they viewed micro-organisms (they got to make their own wet mount slides at one), and one more station that I did not get to see. I was in charge of the dissecting microscope station, and I noticed that all the kids were really enjoying it, and they were doing a great job of exploring the specimens they were given. By the way, don’t look at your fingernails under a microscope…you won’t like what you see.

     The second part of the trip was a hike. We have been learning about classifying plants for the past few days, so this was a perfect time for the kids to practice classifying and for me to do some informal probing. All of the kids in my group were able to find non-vascular plants, vascular seed bearing, and vascular non-seed bearing plants that have spores instead. One student even identified some mushrooms as fungi so we talked a little bit about fungi and why these mushrooms were on the dead logs (because they are decomposers). What really impressed me was some of their abilities to classify some plants. I showed them a few different plants during the hike, and they were able to classify them. For example, I held up a small branch that had pine needles on it, and one of the students classified it perfectly: vascular, seed-bearing, gymnosperm. After he classified, another student even pointed out that that kind of plant is called a conifer.

     Overall, the field trip was a good reinforcement and chance to see things in the real world for the kids. It was also a great chance for me to get to see how their learning is progressing without having to do a usual classroom activity.