Doesn’t every teacher want to be a little like Miss Frizzle, with a magic school bus, funky outfits and the coolest field trips?! I know I do! These last two weeks, I really tried to immerse my class in the study of the United states by taking them on a road trip. Here is what we did.
A couple of weeks ago, I handed my students an image of a suitcase, a folder to glue it on and told them to get ready to pack their bags! We were going on an epic road trip! “But Ms. Taylor, my mom doesn’t know about this! I can’t leave her….. I have never been on a plane to Hawaii! How are we going to go in the middle of a pandemic?!” I had to dash their dreams, we weren’t really going to Hawaii, California, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Tennessee or Vermont but thanks to technology we still had a pretty good time!
We used this immersive trip as a way to teach some study skills, letter writing and as a jumping off point for an independent investigation of states and regions of the USA. Here are the resources that made this trip more exciting and engaging for my learners, you might find them useful too.
Google Earth: Thanks to the technology teacher at my school, my students were very familiar with Google Earth. It is a great tool to make you feel like you are walking in the place you are visiting. I really recommend it for visiting the Grand Canyon.
Google Maps: This tool allowed us to see and understand the distance every place was from our school and each other destination. “How many days would take me to bike to the Rocky Mountains, Ms. Taylor?”
The National Park Service: Most parks have ranger lead videos that take you on tours of the parks. If they don’t have videos, they have 360 view photos or live cams. Here are the ones we used:
- Sequoia National Park
- Grand Canyon, paired this with Google Earth
- Rocky Mountains
- Mesa Verde
- St.Louis Arch
Books: We used many books by Jason Chin, his illustration and text are beautiful the students love them. Check out his book about the Grand Canyon, the Redwoods and the new book he illustrated that we also loved called Watercress. In addition to these books, we used the book The Mountain Chef, to learn about how one man helped use food to start the National Park Service and we used, and baked from the book How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the USA. Thanks to Epic! I was able to assign kids a library of books about each state we visited, so they could read more about wildlife, landforms and commerce in the states we traveled.
Newsela and Achieve3000: these 2 resources provided us with articles to read about fun and interesting things happening in the states we visited. Newsela also has articles, at a variety of levels, about each state. These articles helped us practice our reading skills, specifically in finding main idea details.
Virtual Field Trips: In addition to visiting the National parks, we also went to some tourist attractions. My students love virtual field trips, so we took a few of these along the way.
- Ben and Jerry’s virtual tour and Seesaw Activity
- Statue of Liberty (took this before our road trip)
- Redwoods
- Mrs. Fields factory tour
Baking: Of course we baked our way through the trip. We made Mrs. Fields cookies, Dollywood’s famous cinnamon sugar bread and St. Louis’ gooey butter cake. Yum!
The next step in this project is having students choose and create their own tour or info guide for a state!
If you decide to take a road trip with your class let me know.