Six Flags, Snow Tubing, Sky Zone, and Such
Because I’ve been thinking a lot about field trips today –
1.) The goal is to take at least 80 kids on any / every trip.
(There are currently 109 kids in sixth grade.)
1a.) The counter-argument to taking a lot of kids on trips goes something like this –
Well, the kids aren’t behaving well enough in school. Why should we reward so many of them if they don’t actually deserve it?
My reply to that –
Well, I do think they deserve awesome trips. (Just like they deserve awesome teachers and an awesome education. Because all humans deserve that.) And I think that, maybe, by taking more kids on trips (and by going on better trips), then more kids will become invested in school. It’s almost like a chicken or the egg thing. If kids see the trips are dope af and (!) earnable, that might help with student motivation instead of waiting for student motivation (or kids behaving better) to happen first.
2.) I want the trips not to suck or be boring so that the kids are as hyped about them as possible.
Here is a list of trips from this year:
Barbeque at school (all kids), Six Flags (90 kids), a lock-in at Rise (85 kids), snow tubing (88 kids), Rebounderz (upcoming; 90 kids), roller skating (upcoming; all kids), and New Hampshire (between 75 and 80 kids depending on the budget).
(This does not include boys and girls nights mentioned below. Or Saturday school trips to colleges.)
[I’m not saying that trips to museums or the like aren’t valuable. They are. Taking fifth graders to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was one of the most powerful things we ever did. However, on balance, I think most kids would rather go to Skyzone than to Liberty Science Center <assuming the cost is around the same>.]
3.) I believe kids should see their ranking every week so they know exactly where they stand / what they need to do better (or keep doing well).
(I can email you an example if you want one!)
4.) Good trips are important but building strong relationships with kids / their families / everyone is about 10,000% more important.
Fall in love with your kids before anything else.
(After that, pretty much anything is possible.)
Have a great weekend,
Mark
From earlier in the year –
We’ve been tracking trips differently this year (in 6th grade).
First, instead of taking the top 80 kids on a particular trip (that number changes depending on the trip but we take at least 80 kids), we’ve been taking the top 35 girls and top 45 boys (which is roughly proportional to the number of girls and boys in the grade).
We’re doing this because we want more boys to earn our trips / for our boys to be more invested in school.
Second, instead of just assigning negative points for consequences on our trip tracker (if you want an example, let me know), we’re also letting kids earn 1.5 positive points per class per week (an idea that Shawn V. effectively argued for last summer). They can earn points for being on-track for Words Read (ELA), regular ELA homework (also ELA), Acellus (science), Mathspace (math), and Newsela (history).
(The maximum amount of points kids can earn is now +7.5. It used to be +6.)
We’re doing this because we want to promote academics as much as possible (instead of just avoiding misbehavior) and I’d like to think this has changed the conversations with kids around earning trips to accurately reflect what we value most: their learning.
Third, we post our trip tracker every Monday night on Google Classroom so that kids / families / everyone know exactly where they stand in terms of ranking / points.
We believe that this level of transparency has helped us be even more honest with the kids about what they’re doing well and what they need to improve.
Fourth, we’ve been trying to have a monthly (or once every two months) boys night and girls night from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. to which every boy / girl in the grade is invited. I think the lack of criteria / open invitation for earning this event has helped kids see that we love all of them and that we’re willing to spend time with all of them (not just the best behaved or the hardest working) outside of school hours.
