Volunteer Experience- Field Trip to USF

I have been wrapped up in FCAT I forgot to blog about the 8^th grade AVID student’s trip to USF. So you planning I was planning a trip for my 8^th grade AVID students to the University of South Florida in Tampa and Busch gardens. The one thing special about this trip more than of my students have never left Orlando, this is not uncommon for where I teach. So students have been excited all year about this trip. As part of the AVID program we try to expose students to the college experience. It’s easy to tell students about college but it’s another thing for them to experience it themselves.

The cost of the trip was $39.00 dollar which included their ticket to Busch garden. Which is an added bonus since it’s only five minutes down the road from USF. My principal pays for the charter buses when we travel. We make sure the students pay less as possible because we are income neighborhood. I made sure at the beginning of the school year I informed students and parents about the $39.00 so they could start saving. I also made sure at every parent night I mentioned the Tampa trip so parent weren’t shocked when students came home with a permission slip. I was shocked when the permission slips went home that first week, by the end of the week I had at least 20 back. Which is very shocking because students usually wait until the last minutes and normally parents don’t have the money right away? This was a great sign we were off to a great start. I have to students four weeks to get their permission slip and money turned in. I was really excited that we had 5 parents and family members volunteer to chaperon this trip. I think because I made the parents and student well informed that this way I had such a great turn out. That is the one thing I noticed about teaching in a Title1 low income school, as teachers we have to give parents and students more notice/time when it come to field trips.

So the day of the field trip students have to be at school by 8:30 which is an hour before school starts. This is an all day field trip. We leave the school at 9:00 a.m. and return at 8:45 p.m. Trust me it’s a long day but it’s so worth it. The energy and excitement from the students is amazing. I know they appreciate it as well. It’s a lot of paper work and a risk to take students out of the county but the memories they will have about this trip is priceless.

We arrive on USF campus a little behind schedule because of the I-4 traffic and our bus driver took the wrong exit. LOL! I can laugh about it now but it wasn’t so funny thing when you have two charter buses filled 64 students and 10 chaperones. The first part of the college tour USF student greets us and take us to visit the following site on campus: College of education classroom, library, student union, dining hall, and dorm rooms. The students enjoyed seeing the sites on campus but the dorm rooms it what sold them on USF. They were just too excited able being able to pick roommates and living with their friends. We all know if you want to keep your friend don’t live with you while in college. LOL.  The last part of the tour the, students get to participate in a jeopardy game and all the information they learned on the college tour were asked during the game. Students loved it. The winning team received bumper stickers and some other USF items. Our tour ended around 1:30 and we headed to Bush gardens. Of courses that was the icing on the cake. I think I had more fun than the students. I love roller costars. My students couldn’t believe that were riding roller costars with their teacher. After the USF trip the students truly had a different respect for me. Over all it was a great trip. We got back to school right at 8:45 p.m. as planned. Oh I forgot to mention we went on a Friday so of course parents were late picking up students. We didn’t leave until 10:00 p.m. because one parent forgot to pick up his daughter. What we knew that was going to happened it happened all the time.  Like I said before the USF trip was great, parent and students thanked me and now all of the want to attend USF and not UCF because of the dorm rooms. Until next time…….