• Brainstorm with your students to choose topics or create stories that relate to your classroom
  curriculum. This is one of the most important steps you can take to connect classroom learning to your students’ field trip experience.
• Complete at least one pre-visit activity from the curriculum guide. You will receive the curriculum guide by e-mail, after we receive your field trip deposit.
• Divide your class into small groups of four to six students and assign a topic to each group. Each group can work on the same topic or variations on a theme, depending on which field trip you choose and your classroom goals.
• Talk to a Zeum Educator.
  
  

• The field trip begins with a 10-15 minute introduction by the Zeum Educator.
• During the field trip, students will be asked to make decisions that will impact the outcome of their project. The Zeum Educator will help students coordinate these decisions and work with the teams to suggest solutions in order to complete each project.
• When all the teams are finished, the Zeum Educator will screen the project(s) for the class. This
  provides a wrap-up for students and time for the Zeum Educator to help them reflect on the process of the field trip. Teachers have the option of taking an electronic version of the projects back to school.
  
  

• Have a class discussion about your field trip experience to talk about what the students learned
  and how it ties into the classroom curriculum.
• Write about your experience in a letter to the Zeum Educators and send it to:

Zeum Education Staff
221 Fourth Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

• Let us know of any pre- or post-visit activities you think would be helpful to
  other classes visiting Zeum.

Mr. Diaz planned a visit to Zeum to complement his fourth-grade life science curriculum. He decided his class would produce four movies representing “not-so-scary animals” in their natural habitat. They began at school by creating their storyboards. Each group of students chose a different scary animal: a tarantula, a rattlesnake, a bat, and a rat. Then the students researched where the creatures lived and what made them interesting. The students showed how they would focus their storyboards on an intriguing aspect of the animal.

When they arrived at Zeum for their field trip, the students knew exactly what they needed to make their clay characters. Each team member had a pre-assigned role, which made the clay character building process go much faster. The students then had more time to focus on animating their creature in front of the camera. Using their storyboards as a guide, each team shot more than 300 pictures to make a 50-second movie.

At the end of the field trip, the class enjoyed the four movies that they had made in less than two hours. The students took their characters home, and Mr. Diaz took a CD of the films back to school. In the classroom, Mr. Diaz reviewed with the class all that they had learned through the clay animation process. The activity enabled Mr. Diaz to share methods of observation and description with his class: how they should study and visually describe an animal. It also engaged the students in discussion and negotiation, as each member of the film crews determined what was most striking about their particular animal.

Mr. Diaz burned CD copies of the movies for all the students to take home, and during the spring open house he set up a computer to screen the movies for the parents.

If you would like more examples of field trip success stories or more ideas on how to relate your classroom curriculum to your Zeum field trip activity, please email fieldrips@zeum.org.