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Viatouch
Teacher Articles
Field Trip Lessons
Writing in Public Places
by Suzanne Borchers
"Stick out your tongue and close your eyes," I said during a light snowfall.
Twenty-seven elementary students tasted snowflakes and wrote sensory poems with mittened hands. It was the first stop on our writing field trip in the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge based on a "virtual residency" with well-known children's writer, Uma Krishnaswami.
Ms. Krishnaswami emailed me classroom activities to try before the field trip in order to heighten the children's Bosque Del Apache experience. She suggested the children pretend to be the birds and animals at the Refuge, and urged us to practice writing poems in the schoolyard.
During the field trip, we used more of Ms. Krishnaswami's suggestions. We walked silently down the Marsh Trail stopping periodically. At one stop, we chose a small object such as a stone, leaf, or insect for close inspection. We each wrote a short poem about it before we returned the object. At another stop, we wrote a poem from a nearby bird's perspective. At the final stop, we wrote our poem about a prohibited thing we wanted to do. One student wrote about the experience of jumping into the water.
At each stop, we shared our poems. We listened with respect as chaperones and children read their poems. The children's deep awareness of the Refuge and its inhabitants gleamed in their poetry.
My students write poetry every year following Ms. Krishnaswami's suggestions as we walk the Marsh Trail at the Bosque Del Apache Refuge and submit poems to the international poetry contest, "River of Words." So far, each year, we have received recognition for a winning or honorable mention poem. Would you like to try this? Here's how:
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Find out how much money your school can afford for a field trip.
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Using that knowledge, make a list of possible field trip sites. Visit each one yourself to note the positive and negative aspects to writing there.
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Decide what kind of writing you want your students to produce. Poetry? Prose?
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Finalize arrangements with the site at least a month in advance.
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Prepare the students for what they will see, hear, touch, smell, and perhaps taste at the site. Gather information about the site with your students and practice different writing techniques.
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Arrive at the site prepared with a plan of action.
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Get everyone to write—even the adults.
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Encourage everyone to share his or her writing. Listeners must respect each other.
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After the visit, students return to the classroom to edit and proofread their writing. You may make suggestions, but final ownership must belong to each student.
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If possible, self-publish the student writing as a classroom book. Submit the poems or stories to a contest, and/or give a public reading of the finished pieces at the site, in your classroom, or for the school.
Resources
Krishnaswami, Uma, Beyond the Field Trip: Teaching and Learning in Public Places. New Haven, CT: Linnet Professional Publications, 2002.
During her fifteen years of teaching, Suzanne Borchers has taught kindergarten through fifth grade students. She now teaches gifted elementary students in two schools in the Socorro Consolidated School District. Her Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge writing experiences can be found in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's "Refuge Update ."2, i. 6, 2005, and in Ms. Krishnaswami's "Beyond the Field Trip: Teaching and Learning in Public Places". She lives in Socorro, N.M. with her husband and two cats.
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