However, once you're there, and students are making, building, experiencing life around them, the hours of preparation are forgotten. It's all about the eyes lighting up and the smiles filling the faces - and that's just on the adults! Watching the kids is way better! Their faces explode with excitement the gestures become huge and animated, and their voices boom with giddiness of their newfound knowledge!
Our fifth graders recently spent the night at the Perot Museum in Dallas. Highly recommended. None of us will ever be able to walk the crowded halls of any museum and wait to see something or to try an interactive exhibit. We are spoiled. Each hour brought the moans of having to move to another floor. Museum officials swept behind the groups gathering the stragglers who needed "just one more minute" to complete their experience!
That's highly engaged.
After the last sweep was done, sleeping bags were rolled out & the lights were down, that's when real learning happened for me. Walking the floor, stepping over the little wild things, listening to them breathe quietly- still & silent for the first time, that was awesome. Curled up in little balls in their sleeping bags, holding their favorite animal or hiding the blanket they didn't want their buddies to see, their innocence and potential revealed.
They were little sponges - deserving the best, expecting to conquer the world, ready for the next big thing.
How do we prepare them? What are we doing to build their confidence? How can we make sure we don't allow anything to stifle their creativity and enthusiasm? How do we protect them from drugs, alcohol and depression?
Maybe just planning a field trip isn't so daunting.
They were protected, at least for that one night, by the dinosaurs they could only envision from television, books, and their dreams.
