A Visit to the Natural History Museum and Classroom Dig

This project will include basically two major elements: a trip to the Museum of Natural History and a classroom dig. This field experience is the only real life, hands on activity the students will be engaged in this year outside of our school campus. The Museum of Natural History has a wonderful collection of fossils that students could experience. The students will be able to view fossils from many different periods of the past. They will be able to touch actual fossils and meet a paleontologist. Meeting the paleontologist gives the students motivation to possibly pursue careers in paleontology, archeology, geology, and many other professions in the science field. This meeting also provides students with accurate information from an “expert” in the field. Students will have the chance to ask engaging questions that are inspired from classroom reading and the observations at the museum. Here they can get scientific answers and information from a professional. The entire second grade would participate in this trip including all our second graders in special education programs. The grade level consists of 120 students from varied backgrounds and language communities. Twenty percent of our students qualify for free or reduced lunch programs. The school is located in the suburbs of Los Angeles. We have many students on child care and open enrollment permits. Parents choose to come to our school from other areas of the city. We receive little funding for any extra experiences outside of the school setting because we are not a Title 1 school. At the end of February or beginning of March 2007, we will begin our unit of study on Fossils. Toward the end of the six week unit, we would like to take this trip to the museum. This will allow the students to process the information we have studied through our reading. Students will see first hand fossils that we were introduced to in our anthology. The discussions that we pursue following the readings can also be confirmed with this hand on experience. Students will be able to connect what they learned in the text with real experience. Students will continue to use higher level thinking skills such as analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating as they write a final assessment that enables students to tell all they know about fossils and the past. We will culminate the unit with our own hands on “dig” on our campus. In past years, only two of the six classrooms participated in the dig. This year, this grant will provide materials for all classes to participate. This experience really grabs students' attention and motivates students to become "experts" in a topic that they love so much and encourages them to continue to love learning. In our school budget, we have no funding available to take students away from the classroom to learn in a real life setting.