The Key to Successful Field Trips at The Henry Ford
The education department at The Henry Ford has the pleasure of working with teachers who do an excellent job of planning their field trips. They each bring their schools and classrooms here for a multitude of reasons but they all agree that preparing their students is the key to a successful field trip. The more preparation that students receive increases their comfort and excitement, leading to a more powerful learning experience. This “prep work” includes both the logistics of the visit and linking what they do and see at The Henry Ford to what they are learning in the classroom.
This spring, we are making two major investments to help teachers better prepare their students prior to visiting us: 
The Henry Ford has a newly designed website to help teachers easily find the many options for customizing a field trip to meet specific curriculum and scheduling needs. Each venue has its own page with logistical assistance for your trip and our most popular curriculum-aligned activities to use before, during and/or after your visit. If you don’t find the perfect resource there, additional activities can be found in our Resource Bank.
Each teacher who books a field trip now through June 30, 2016 will receive a season one DVD of The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation. In this Emmy-award winning TV series, host Mo Rocca meets up with our curators to learn the significance of our most famous artifacts and experiences – and lets viewers in on some hidden gems. Then, co-hosts visit with today’s innovators, linking the past with the present and future. Some of these innovators are even the same age as our field trip visitors!
The clips can tie classroom curriculum to the artifacts and experiences at The Henry Ford. For example, a high school U.S. History class visiting Henry Ford Museum should watch our segment on the Rosa Parks Bus. An elementary class studying inventors should check out the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison segments before coming to Greenfield Village.
If you are interested in your own copy of The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation Season 1 DVD, it is available in our gift shops and online. You can also access individual clips of both season 1 and season 2 on The Henry Ford’s YouTube channel.
Check your local listings to see when The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation is airing on CBS in your area.
We believe that equipping teachers with new features on our revamped website and episodes from the TV show will help to better prepare students for a visit to The Henry Ford so that they can be inspired by the stories of American ingenuity, resourcefulness and innovation. After all…THEY are the ones who will produce future innovations to help shape a better future.
Catherine Tuczek is Curator of School and Public Learning and Phil Grumm is Curator of Digital Learning at The Henry Ford. Want to be the first to know about our latest resources and special offers? Then sign up for our OnLearning newsletter.
TV, The Henry Ford's Innovation Nation, educational resources, education, field trips, by Phil Grumm, by Catherine Tuczek
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