Investigate Mount St. Helens with us in a live, interactive, and thought-provoking virtual field trip program! While we cannot visit the mountain in person, you and your students can visit in the next best way - in an interactive 360-degree virtual environment! Our virtual field trip packages are aligned to Next Generation Science Standards, are directed by student observations, and come with ready-to-use lessons plans for before and after your field trip with us.
Live Field Trip Duration: 45 min to 1 hour
Suitable for: Students Grades 4-8
Cost: $125 per class group, up to 30 students. Financial assistance is available for qualifying groups.
Virtual Field Trip Package Includes:
GEOLOGY: Building Up & Breaking DownWhat causes landforms to build up and break down? How do different forces of geology change the shape of the land? Students will explore different ways that geologic phenomena have sculpted the land. The elementary school field trip package supports the NGSS Performance Expectations 4-ESS1-1. The middle school field trip package supports the NGSS Performance Expectation MS-ESS2-2. |
ECOLOGY: Renewal of Life
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Our pre-field trip activity includes pre-recorded videos about the 1980 eruption and a follow-up activity to review the events of the 1980 eruption.
Your students will visit different virtual sites that each feature a different phenomenon at Mount St. Helens. At their sites, they will make observations, and explore photos, video, and other media that provide evidence to help them figure out what happened at their site.
360-degree photos that students can use to explore the site that they are visiting in all directions.
Embedded forms for student responses. Student responses will be recorded in a Google Sheet and Mount St. Helens staff will share your students’ responses with you.
Clickable icons that will pop up with photos and videos to provide evidence and support student sense-making of the phenomenon at their site.
After students have explored the virtual field trip on their own, Mount St. Helens Institute staff will lead a live session on a platform of your choice. Our field trips are designed to minimize lecture time and to maximize time for students to make observations, practice scientific thinking, and engage in group conversations. Our educators will be the “guide on the side” as the entire class visits each site together, shares what they noticed and what they thought about it. There will be time for Q&A.
We will also provide a lesson plan and resources for after the live session. Students are asked to come together and to apply what they learned from visiting various field sites around the landscape of Mount St. Helens to draw conclusions and make predictions about patterns in other related landscapes.
Your virtual field trip sites in the 360 environment will remain available for the remainder of the semester.
We can provide a copy of the virtual field trip as an executable file that works on Windows or Mac.
Please email learn@mshinstitute.org to discuss the best solution to replace the live session. This could include a 1-on-1 session with the teacher or providing some written responses to student questions.