General News
Adventures for your students abound in Big Apple
Oct 4, 2007 11:23 AM
Two students learn what life was once like at a basket-weaving demonstration at the Staten Island Historical Society.
Once upon a time, class trips for New York City public school kids were grand two-day adventures to far-off places.
Retired teacher Arnold Heller tells of annual overnight trips he arranged from 1970 to 1994 to Gettysburg and the Amish country for 7th-graders, and to Washington, D.C., and Boston for 8th-graders in groups of 100-150 from JHS 93 and IS 77 in Queens.
Class trips are more limited today, but don’t overlook the great one-day adventures in our city’s own backyard that should tempt teachers and students out of their classrooms.
More and more teachers and the great museums, historical societies and cultural centers of the five boroughs are working together with all eyes on the curriculum to make the world beyond classrooms and neighborhoods come alive for the city’s children.
At one of the city’s prize jewels, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, school buses line up daily with students and teachers eager to explore its riches.
School buses ferry hundreds of New York City students and their teachers to the Metropolitan Museum for class trips to explore the museum’s riches.
For art teacher Ron Klokke of IS 392 in Brooklyn, the experience at the Met “will be something my students will remember for the rest of their lives and one of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my professional career.”
That’s pretty high praise and it was for the Student as Museum Researcher Program, a three-visit experience in which each student picked a Greek or Roman museum piece, then went back to research it at the Uris Library where, he said, “The kids ate up the books and articles and found a lot of information that was not only useful but fascinating.” Their research done and their reports written, it was back to the museum to present their findings “as art historians and experts.”
Between visits they kept asking, “When are we going back to the museum?”
The New-York Historical Society describes itself as “a learning community for all, a place brimming with heroines, heroes, generals, presidents, inventors and folk legends with tales to tell and small wonders to show.”
Liza Pitsirilos of the HS for Law and Public Service agrees with that description. She found the Slavery in New York Exhibit was an eye-opening experience for her students. “The exhibit was memorable,” she said, “because it took you through a timeline of New York’s involvement during slavery right up to the Civil War.”
Programs the Society describes as “designed to get school kids thinking, living, breathing — yes, even imagining — history with new excitement” include “Immigration: America Begins in New York” and “Seneca Village,” about a community founded by free African Americans in Central Park in 1825.
The focus is not just on kids but on teachers, too. For teachers, there are lesson plans and activities to enrich classroom lessons and a series of workshops — attended last year by 5,000 teachers.
At the Staten Island Historical Society, a newly created teachers’ advisory group provides feedback on what teachers need. Another task force is working with the Department of Education to integrate the Society’s resources with the new scope and sequencing for the social studies curriculum.
In the African Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, students and their teacher listen raptly to the story being told by a museum docent.
Blanche Ricci of PS 30 on Staten Island is a fan and frequent visitor to Richmondtown at the Society. “The children get to see period dress and do the chores that children did years ago,” she explained. “They see what the world looked like long ago and then we compare that to modern-day Staten Island.”
Corrine DeMolli, a 4th-grade teacher at PS 230, put in a plug for the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Sanctuary where students get a taste of what life was like when only Native Americans lived there and for the Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Center where the emphasis is history, art and the surrounding architecture of the city. Her advice: “Book early!”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg for class trips. Don’t forget the zoos, theaters, scientific and technology exhibits and so many more places to explore to quicken student curiosity and widen their horizons. After all, New York is a mecca for tourists from all over the world and it should be for our students too.
