Field trips help preschoolers explore the world through a variety of learning modalities including visual, auditory and tactile learning. Field trips provide opportunities for preschoolers to see, hear and touch things they might not otherwise explore in a classroom setting. A field trip to a farm allows preschoolers to connect farm stories, songs and paper plate crafts to real farm animals. Students can see the way a cow chews her food, hear a piglet grunt and feel the fur of a goat.
Field trips provide real-life opportunities for preschoolers to broaden their experiences beyond home and school. By taking field trips to fire stations, police stations, post offices, hospitals or libraries, preschoolers learn about community helpers and their jobs. These experiences enable preschoolers to see how some workers keep us safe while others help us learn or communicate. In addition, field trips to parks, forest centers and zoos allow preschoolers to learn about the environment, develop a sense of respect for the natural world and foster their sense of wonder and discovery.
To develop good listening and speaking skills, preschoolers need a variety of authentic experiences to practice listening and speaking. Field trips provide opportunities for preschoolers to listen to directions, gather information, ask questions and communicate with adults they don't see everyday. Preschoolers can practice speaking up in noisy environments, taking turns asking questions, engaging in two-way conversations and focusing their attention on a speaker when other things are happening around them.
Preschoolers, as with learners of all ages, learn new information by building on existing knowledge. Read a book about dogs to a class of preschoolers, and many will raise their hands to share they have a dog or their uncle has a yellow dog like the one in the book. Field trips provide experiences for preschoolers to build a body of background knowledge to use later in their educational careers. A field trip to an airport or marina helps preschoolers identify different modes of transportation. Later when reading about barges or cargo ships, students can draw on their background knowledge to connect new learning to old learning.