What’s Cool at School: Seniors plan field trip for 4th graders

When the seniors in the Midway University dual credit history class at Woodford County High School returned from winter break, their social studies teacher immediately assigned them a project.

“The students have crafted, through project-based learning, exhibits. They dove into the fourth grade (academic) standards, wrote a full lesson plan that was tightly tied and aligned with our state standards and they designed a lesson plan with an engaging exhibit that features the rich and complex heritage of our state,” said Dr. Amber Sergent.

Essentially, they were given four months to come up with an immersive, interactive field trip for the county’s fourth-grade students based on aspects of Kentucky’s history.

Dr. Sergent provided guidance but not much help, as they devised about 10 different stations for the students to rotate through and learn something new about the Commonwealth. Some of the exhibits included lessons about Muhammad Ali and the origin of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“We’ve got horse exhibits, coal mining exhibits, barn quilt making, and all kinds of things that are supposed to make the history of Kentucky a little more interesting for them,” said senior Hannah Hash.

The fourth graders certainly learned a lot and still enjoyed the field trip, which is, of course, an important part of any field trip. However, the seniors took home some real-world practice experience for themselves by working on this together over the last four months.

“The importance of articulation, and clarity and cohesion of ideas,” Dr. Sergent explained. “Most importantly [they learned] how to work together. You’re looking at 81 high school seniors that have crafted an organized and worked through things together,” she continued.

That seems like a minor thing, but given their pedigree, it's not that easy for some of these kids.

“As dual credit students, we’re overachievers, and we like to take on more than we can chew at times,” Hash stated. “So this has been a great project teaching us leadership skills in general,” she added.

The fourth graders here followed the senior leaders around all day long, and by watching the exhibits it was easy to see them absorbing every aspect of their lesson plan.