Do you remember any of your class trips from school? I grew up in the UK and although now in my forties, I still remember a stand-out trip from when I was 10 years old! It involved dressing up in Tudor costume and a stuffed 5-legged deer!
I’ve been lucky to spend my career in education working at some amazing school trip sites including a zoo, 2 natural history museums, and even a theme park! I’ve seen first-hand the impact that out-of-school visits can have on children’s learning, confidence, and broadening their view of the world.
If you have a field or school trip coming up and are looking to find out which aspects of the visit made the biggest impact on your students, it’s time to plan a field trip reflection activity.
Reasons for reflecting on a field trip
- Reinforce learning: Help students remember what they learned, ready to apply it in the classroom. It also helps put prior learning in context.
- Self-expression: Helps students connect with their thoughts and feelings about the visit.
- Communication Skills: Students can practice writing, speaking and listening skills as they organize and present their thoughts.
- See the impact: Helps you as the teacher see the impact of the trip and what students gained from it.
- Future planning: Helps you with future trip planning by seeing what impact the trip had on your students.
- You can share helpful feedback with staff at the location you visited. We used to love hearing feedback from children and schools where I worked.
Questions you could use to help students reflect on a field or school trip
- Why did we go on this trip?
- What was the most memorable part?
- Did anything surprise you about this trip?
- What interested you the most?
- What were the top 3 things you learned?
- What was the most exciting part of this trip?
- What made you think ‘wow’?
- What was your favorite activity and why?
- What did you enjoy least and why?
- What would you still like to know having been on this trip?
- If you could go back again, what would you do/see?
- What is something you didn’t know before this trip?
- Would you recommend this trip to other children? Why? Why not?
- What was something you found challenging/difficult?
- What is something you’ll remember about this visit?
- Is there anything you’ll do differently now you’ve been to……?
- How did this visit compare to other trips you have been on?
- Would your family enjoy visiting this place?
You could use these questions as speaking or writing prompts. Too many questions can be overwhelming. Select those that reflect what you want students to think about and what you want to find out from them.
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