Rochambeau Field Trip

Do you ever feel as if you’d like to shake things up a bit, but aren’t sure what to try? Do you ever wonder how your students’ act or react in the “real” world? Do you ever want to just stand your students up and say “let’s go for a walk”?

Forced to vacate the community room for the semi-annual Friends of the Rochambeau library booksale this October, Kim Libby and I were looking for a low cost/low prep field trip that would both stimulate students to engage in conversation and generate meaningful activities for following lessons.

What better place to explore than one’s own neighborhood, we thought.

We started off by dividing the multilevel class into two groups (not based on language level) and then set out in different directions in the immediate neighborhood of the library. It was our aim that the students’ questions would arise naturally out of what they were seeing. Sure enough, as we passed a church or a cable truck, different students had interesting questions about what they were seeing.

In both groups, student began querying us almost immediately, e.g. when one student saw an election campaign sign on someone’s front lawn, she wanted to know why the owner of the house had his name so prominently on display. In Kim’s group, there proved to be so much stimuli, that they were only able to cover one city block in an hour. It was especially pleasing to see that many students brought a pen and small notebook and diligently wrote down the various new vocabulary words they were learning from the walk.

After about an hour we met again in front of the library and the groups shared some of their experiences with one another. Afterwards a smaller group went to a local café to chat.

The following class we had the students write about five things they had seen on their walk; after which we paired students of opposite groups together and had them share some of their experiences with each other. Finally, we did a computer lesson with the whole group, teaching them how to google some of the images they had seen on their walks, e.g. squirrels, mail trucks, intersections, Cumberland Farms, etc. and then print them out. At one point in the lesson, when two students couldn’t find an image of the church next door because they hadn’t written down the name properly, I simply had them go back outside to copy the name correctly, after which they were able to find the image.

One unintended consequence of this field trip was that one of the students, Ayfer Cicek, learned that a local pizza restaurant was hiring and ended up securing a job there later in the week.

So, next time you’re forced to come up with an alternate plan, try exploring your own neighborhood. You might find out that your students are more curious than you give them credit for – perhaps they’re only lacking the proper stimulus.