Inside: Use these Field Trip Thank You Note Templates and guest speaker thank you note templates to show gratitude and kindness after a school or scout trip.
When I was a kid, the best days ever were school field trip days.
We went to see marionettes at a puppet theater, went to a matzah factory, toured Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles, and went to the La Brea Tar Pits to see the dinosaur fossils.
We loved being outside of the classroom, riding a school bus and getting away from desk work.
But when we came back to school, we almost also wrote a thank you note to the museum or the tour guide thanking them for their time.
Why?
We always suspected it was a way to practice writing informal letters.
But really it was a way to show we were grateful for the trip and appreciated the time and knowledge of the person guiding us.
And of course, when I was an elementary school teacher, the field trips continued and while I no longer loved field trip days, my students certainly did.
We went to pumpkin patches, and cowboy museums, and to see theatre productions of stories we read in class.
And we always came back to school and wrote a thank you note.
I can now confirm it 100% sneaks in informal letter-writing practice, but more importantly, writing thank you notes after field trips encourages kids to show gratitude and kindness towards those who helped make their learning more hands-on and experiential.
To make writing field trip thank you notes (or guest speaker thank you notes) easier for you and your students, you can use these Field Trip Thank You Note Templates.
How to Use the Field Trip Thank You Notes and Guest Speaker Thank You Notes:
1. Download and print out the field trip thank you note template you wish to use depending on which trip you took/speaker came to visit and the writing level of your kids. (Download it below).
48 Field Trips/Guest Speaker Templates to choose from for early writers and writers:
- Firefighter/fire station
- Zoo/animal habitat
- Farmer/farm/pumpkin patch
- Aquarium/touch tank
- Forest/nature preserve
- Police officer/police station
- Garbage collector/Recycling Center/Landfill
- City government/city hall/judicial branch
- Planetarium
- Park ranger/historical site/national or state park
- Natural history museum/paleontologist/science museum
- Art museum
- Tour Guide
- Guest Reader (male/female)
- School Bus (for all other general field trips)
2. Explain what a thank you note is and why it’s important that we write one after a visit.
Talk about how we can show gratitude for the docent, tour guide, ranger, speaker or worker’s time and thank them for sharing their knowledge so they feel appreciated.
Ask if they’ve ever written thank you notes for anything else they’ve ever received or got to experience to connect it to their lives.
3. Use our “Recipe” for Thank you Notes to help students write a meaningful thank you note, adjusting the “recipe” to your kids’ writing level (younger students write one of the prompts, older students can easily write all the prompts and include 3 things they learned).
For the “Thank you for” line, it could include Thank you for:
- coming to our school,
- allowing us to visit,
- welcoming us,
- showing us your ____,
- letting us____,
- teaching us____,
- reading us ______, etc.
4. Brainstorm words or phrases they can use and write them on the board for kids to use as they’re writing.
This is helpful to jog memories and recap the trip, but to also write down phrases and big vocabulary words to help with spelling. Even I can’t spell Tyranasuraus Rex or paleontologist correctly without looking it up.
Include brainstorms on things they learned, what they liked about the trip, and questions they still have they didn’t get a chance to ask.
5. Encourage kids to write or dictate their thank you notes and draw a picture if appropriate. Use skin color crayons to color in the images.
6. Have them reread their field trip thank you note to make sure it makes sense and encourage them to revise and/or proofread as appropriate.
7. To connect to listening and speaking, encourage students to read their letters out loud and share with the class.
8. Bind the thank you letters together and deliver them or mail them with a few group photos or action shots you took.
Ready to get the Field Trip Thank You Note Templates?
Get the Field Trip Thank You Notes here!
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