The Benefits of a Museum/Field Trip

1. Students are energized by the excitement and anticipation of leaving the school environment.

2. The transportation to and from the museum/site is often a pleasant open-social time.

3. Students have the opportunity to see new things and learn about them in a more unstructured way.

4. Students have the opportunity to determine what they learn and how they learn it. Said differently, student learning can be interest-driven, not teacher and curriculum driven.

5. Students will experience a more holistic, integrated picture of the information that, in the classroom, may have only been presented in a textual and abstract way.

6. Museums, and many other kinds of field trips are multi-media experiences; therefore, learning is enriched and reinforced with superimposing sensory and intellectual inputs.

7. Most museums are designed to stimulate curiosity and actively engage the visitor, so you have a very professional partner working with you to help your students learn.

8. In some museums you can arrange for your class to meet with a museum educator, often in a private classroom, to facilitate directed learning and/or provide a question-answer session.