Teachers in Florida are using field trips to help their students on the FCAT:
Some Martin County schools place such importance on field trips that they've secured thousands of dollars in grant money to pay for impoverished students to visit places they normally would not see.
Many of the school's field trips aren't out of the ordinary: the bookstore, bowling, the movies. But many children in Port Salerno and rural Indiantown haven't done these things that seem "normal to us as middle class"...
Teachers say these trips help develop reading and writing skills by expanding students' vocabularies and helping them relate to reading passages. And a field trip, even one as simple as the annual Olive Garden outing, helps them understand what they have read in books.
"If you can go to an Italian restaurant and taste the spaghetti and sauce, you can do it much faster than you can reading about Italy," Miller said.
Port Salerno Elementary third-grade teacher Joe Harper said many of the things children read about in typical elementary books can be foreign to children from other cultures. Harper said he used to be surprised by the simple English words his students couldn't put into context, even though they were reading at grade level.
"They're fluent at a third-grade level, but their comprehension is maybe at a first-grade level because they don't have the cultural background," he said. "Things unique to America they just don't see. Something I've become a lot better with over the years is not to assume anything."
Posted by kswygert at February 23, 2004 04:22 PM