Activities Page Two

Home Preschool Curriculum
Developed by: Community Collaboration for Four Year Olds
School District of La Crosse

Field Trips - Getting to Know Your Community

Visiting places in your community is fun and educational for your child. Besides learning about new places, field trips are also an excellent way to promote language development. Your child will learn new words while on the field trip and will want to talk about their experience afterwards. Bring your camera along so you can take pictures of what you see. You and your child will enjoy looking at the pictures and talking about what you learned.

Asking Open-Ended Questions

A question like "Where are we going today?" evokes a one-word response. But an open-ended question, "What do you think we'll see at the park?" encourages a child to think about the park and come up with his own ideas about what he might see. There is no right or wrong answer here.

An answer to an open-ended question gives us a window into what a child is thinking and feeling. And the response is sometimes wonderfully creative. When explaining or describing, children also use language more fully.

It is difficult to change the closed-end question habit. But when we ask open-ended questions, children benefit by thinking through their responses and expressing their unique thoughts. Their answers help us find out more about what they think and feel.

Questions to ask before the field trip:

How will we get there?
Why would we go there?
Who will be there?
Who works there?
What are their jobs?
What might we learn?
What things do you already know about the place we are visiting?

Questions to ask after the field trip:

What interesting things did we see?
What did you learn that you didn't know before?
Did anything surprise you?