San Francisco Express

Three days ago I went on perhaps the best field trip of my short teaching career. There are a couple reasons that made this field trip such a success. First and foremost would be the fact that I had 10 parent volunteers. This obviously makes life so much easier as I can now have very small groups with each parent, and it also freed me up to not have a group at all( Nice planning Haviland). We started off in Sacramento where we caught the Amtrak to San Francisco. This was once again a nice surprise because the our school go to a while car to ourselves. This allowed the kids to spread out and play card games on the tables and talk to friends or listen to music. After we got to San Francisco(pier 39 to be exact) we separated for lunch. Each parent taking their group to eat(each child brought some money or a sack lunch from home). I along with then other teacher was now free of kids and was able to walk slowly down the pier to Bubba Gumps for lunch. From here we wandered over to the Hyde Street Pier and went on some of the boats there, Especially the ones that were used by explorers to come over to this country. After that we walked back to pier 39, but on our way we stopped at an old fashioned arcade where the kids could play and see the games that used to be at carnivals around the country. SO all in all it was stress free trip. It left me wondering why all field trip can't be that way. Most of them are filled with stress and way to hard to put together. I remember as a student I loved field trips and always wanted them, but now as a teacher I usually dread them because of all the work that goes into one. If all field trip were this easy I would take one everyday(I don't think that would follow the curriculum though)