The Classroom Teacher Role ~ Before

Part I: PLAN

Your Hidden Villa field trip can offer you and your students so much. Besides the power of your students' experiences in their personal lives, the excitement and motivation students bring back from the field trip can be creatively harnessed for learning academic standards as well. Before your field trip, take the time to consider how you are going to integrate your students' experiences back into the classroom. What aspect of the field trip to you think your students will be most intrigued by? What projects do you think will help them most capitalize on their new knowledge in order to learn academic standards? How would you like to use your students' Hidden Villa experiences to support their personal growth? I encourage you to look through the "curriculum" pages of this webpage to help inspire project ideas. If there is a particular topic you would like students to focus on during the field trip, be sure to communicate this to the Hidden Villa staff before your pre-field trip presentation. (More details explained in the "signing-up" pages of this webpage.)

Part II: PREPARE

All field trips involve a few special logistical arrangements. After making arrangements with Hidden Villa and your transportation system, you will need to inform your classroom parents about the planned field trip and secure permission slips (and field trip fee depending on your school) for each child. Both child and parent also need to understand what to bring and what to wear on the field trip. As students will be very active during the day, they should have on comfortable shoes for walking, a bottle of water in their backpack, and several different layers of clothing for changing weather. Hidden Villa STRONGLY requests that students bring a Hidden Villa Healthy Lunch that is good for the body and good for the environment. Even when the majority of my class has been on free lunch program, I have still asked all students to prepare their own lunch for this field trip. With the focus on re-using old containers, eating healthy foods and staying away from pre-packaged snacks, I have found that most families do not find this to be financial burden.

Finally, as teachers we need to prepare our students for the field trip so that they are ready to participate fully and return to class equipped to take on the integrated curriculum. There are a few short, 1 to 2 day lessons that I would encourage all teachers to implement before the field trip. These can be found by clicking on the "Curriculum" tab above and selecting "Before Trip."