 We decided as a team that walking around the tidal basin would be a field trip. It's not a field trip. We've ever done before So it was a new experiment But our students often don't get into Washington DC in spite of the fact that we live 10 miles south of the city Many of our kids don't ever cross the Potomac River So it's a goal of ours every year to somehow take them into the city and see the monuments the memorials Anthony What does it say? It's explaining about his wheelchair He didn't want people to know that he was in a wheelchair So he didn't want a wheelchair that looked like a regular wheelchair Eddie This is called braille For people who are blind and they can't see each of these collections of dots shows a letter So this shows the letter L this shows the letter I So they would feel it with their fingers To read it because they can't people who can't see can you imagine reading with your fingers instead of your eyes? So we did a little bit of preparation before we went Looking at a map and making our own map and looking at pictures of the three different memorials. We would be visiting To sort of give the kids some background knowledge before we got there and we spent some time practicing with the cameras We've used the cameras all year, but we've never taken them off-site. Okay when FDR was president You almost 100 years ago things in the United States were very rough a lot of people did not have jobs People who did have jobs often didn't have a lot of money. So you see people waiting in line here They're waiting for either a job or for food because people were having when he was president He had a big job of trying to make people's lives better in the United States They had the the mechanics of using the cameras, but I wanted them to really be thinking about We're gonna take these pictures back and make a movie with them You want to take pictures of things that are meaningful and not just random shots of your friends So we practice with that before we went and then on the field trip Between digital cameras and flip video cameras. I had enough cameras for about one out of every two students So they had to share them. They took mostly pretty meaningful pictures There are very few pictures of just the other kids in the class They're mostly pictures of the monuments There's pictures of the tidal basin and pictures of the ducks in the tidal basin But for my kids who don't get to get outside and certainly aren't just spending time at a park with ducks That's actually a pretty memorable piece of the field trip to them Cameras really kept them focused and engaged and made it easier for them not to feel a great urge to jump in to any of the fountains at the Franklin Delores Memorial or climb on the rocks there things that I think Would have held their interest more than the actual memorial without the cameras But looking through that lens and trying to think about what was important kept their focus on what they were seeing