Field Trip Fun w/ a Freebie

We recently spent a day at the Museum of Discovery and Science in downtown Ft. Lauderdale. We saw an excellent 3D dinosaur movie and had a great class led by one of the museum volunteers. We ran from the otters to the fossil dig to the Everglades experience, we harassed a mastodon and climbed in and out of a giant shark about a thousand and ten times. Then we ate lunch outside in the 90 degree weather while fending off GIANT pigeons that we made sure we didn't feed. Which obviously is not the norm. I'm surprised these pidgies could even fly! But who am I to talk...I'm having some trouble getting off the ground myself these days.

We capped off the day with a 40 minute un-air-conditioned, bumpy bus ride back to the other end of the county. The kids were actually great and we all had tons of fun, but by the time we were back in the classroom the kids were all hot, sweaty and tired! (Wait, maybe that was just me...) Anyhow, I had about 25 minutes before dismissal and ZERO energy, so we welcomed Miss Frizzle to the room to share just a little bit more about dinosaurs, just in case we missed something at the museum.

I had a few little pangs of guilt. I thought I should be leading some great discussion about everything we had just seen and done, but I just didn't have it in me. I was also wishing that I at least had some kind of fun activity that I could give them so that they could work in groups to discuss it with each other because somehow they still actually had some energy left. But, I had nada. zip. zero. zilch. I felt bad, but not bad enough to turn off the Frizz.

I dragged myself home, crawled into bed and settled in for a nap and...I couldn't sleep!! Can you believe?? I was so dog tired, but my brain was racing with ideas. So I stopped fighting it and rolled my butt out of bed and started working.

I ended up creating a packet of stuff that I can not even believe I haven't had before! I made a whole packet full of field trip teacher planning pages, student activities and even a glyph and bulletin board activity. I was pretty impressed with my sleepy self for coming up with what I did. I was a little less impressed the next day when I went back to proofread everything, but no worries, it's all fixed now.

So, the next day we tried out some of my ideas, and I have to say, they were pretty good! With some hot coffee in me and a good night's sleep, we did have a great discussion about what we did and then the kids worked on a few of the activities from the packet. Here is the Field Trip Wrap-up, a nice review of the day:

I'm loving how their drawings so accurately depicted the day. 

They haven't even seen the real pix yet. Love this!

And here are a few of their bus glyphs. The glyph was great, because it allowed them to freely express how they felt about the trip without having to say it out loud. I walked around and listened to the table chatter as they were working and it gave me a some insight into what they really thought and remembered about the trip (the pigeons, the big shark and the bus ride...)

If you're interested, I put the whole packet together on TpT which you can see {HERE} (It's on sale until 4/16!) You can also grab the Field Trip Wrap-up page free by clicking {HERE}.

As much as I'm excited to use these activities for my field trips in the future, I'm secretly relived I don't have to until next year! :)