Students from MSD enjoy a day of field trips
Dec 30, 2022 02:42PM ● By Verlene Johnson
One thing that most students would agree is the highlight of school is field trips. For years, fifth graders from Morgan Elementary have enjoyed learning about different career options, culminating in a field trip to Salt Lake City to JA City, formally known as JA Biz Town.
Even with moving fifth grade to Morgan Middle School, teachers have continued this field trip. Students prepare for this by learning about jobs, money and balancing checkbooks.
This year, Lena Rose was voted as the mayor of JA City. Student interview for jobs they wanted such as CEOs, CFOs, bank tellers, news anchors and producers and retail stores. They are then interviewed by teachers, principals, custodians and parents. After which, they are assigned a job. On November 28, fifth-grade students and teachers along with parents meeting them in SLC, embark on this tiny town inside a 10,000-square-foot building located inside Discovery Gateway. Once there, students report to one of 20 different storefronts for their jobs where they earn money to buy things in stores that are ran by their classmates.
Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, eighth graders from MMS went to Hill Air Force Base Museum, splitting the 130 students over the two days. Fifth-grade teacher Aaron Croft said the field trip intended to facilitate a real-world experience that would give greater meaning to the things they've been learning in their classes. “Specifically, we wanted to help the students: understand the rich heritage of sacrifice, honor, and duty that they are part of here in Utah, understand how the theoretical things they've been learning in science and math can be applied in the real world to make it better and safer.” Teachers wanted to show students that math and science do have value in the world.
Once there, they broke into small groups and were hosted by Air Force Veterans who provided a tour of the exhibits and answered questions. Some of the things they explored were a Black Bird, a Hercules, a model of Wright Bros. original airplane, a flying fortress and a huge landing gear from a Super Galaxy.
Students also learned how the different aircraft are identified by the letter at the start of their name, for example, H to identify helicopters, B for a bomber, F for the fighter, C for cargo, S for stealth, OV for observation and R for reconnaissance.
Eighth-grade students at Mountain Green Middle School also had the opportunity to go to SLC for a field trip. As buses dropped off groups of students at different locations, with a parent chaperone and an envelope containing a list of significant places they had to find, they began a scavenger hunt. Once they located a place on the list, each group took a picture of their group to show they found it.
The winning team was the students who checked in by a certain time in front of Clark Planetarium where they were able to explore the exhibits about Earth and space before watching an IMax Movie called “Beautiful Earth.”
Because this was a scavenger hunt that eighth-grade math teacher, Lisa Buitkofer, said they hope to make a yearly field trip, she decided details of what they needed to locate and pictures would give away the fun for next year’s students.
