REVIEW, REFLECT & RECORD

Don't let your field trip experience begin and end on the day of your Group Tour. In the following days, enabling and ecouraging students to share general observations and reactions to particular exhibits will further enhance and reinforce the lessons your group has learned at the New York State Museum.

Review:

• Revisit the themes and lessons learned from the Group Tour and/or other exhibits you may have investigated. What did students like most? What did they dislike?
  
  
• Review new vocabulary words that may have been introduced during the Group Tour or in field trip observations.
  
  
• Go online and use the Museum's website to review exhibitions and areas visited. http://www.nysm.nysed.gov

Reflect:

Have students pair up or get into groups to compare and contrast individual experiences. If students took notes, drew sketches, or made observations, have another member of the group summarize and present those notations to the class. Create a journal entry about the experience. First Prize! - Ask students to discuss an exhibit and/or specific artifact or obejct and vote on which they consider to be the most valuable in terms of historical or relevant significance.

Record:

• Create a classroom bulletin board displaying materials developed or collected while on the field trip.
  
  
• Create a short news report about what happened on the field trip.
  
  
• Design your own classroom exhibit! Create teams of scientists, planners, designers and docents who will reserch, develop, write content and create displays around a specific theme you are currently studying.
  
  
• Use photographs taken by students and staff to create a visual presentation or to create a field trip time-line display in the classroom or school hallway. Allow each student to add a photo to the display and then talk about what was going on in the photo or share a memory of that particular aspect of the trip.
  
  
• Have students design an advertisement or poster announcing one of the exhibits they visited.
  
  
• To inject math into your field trip review, have students count objects that appear in photographs from the exhibits. How many animals do you see? How many pieces of pottery? Or have students organize photographs of each exhibit according to when that particular moment would appear on a historical timeline. Which exhibits display "older" events? Which are more recent?