Embracing Partnerships with Informal Settings to Enhance Teaching and Learning

While at the museum, children will learn about historical and modern-day treasure hunting and will engage in interdisciplinary activities to help them understand treasure hunting at sea. Because of distance and a lack of funding, learning experiences outside her formal classroom can be hard to arrange. [...]when Ms. Moquin approached her principal about the possibility of taking preschoolers to this museum, the principal was immediately supportive of finding funding and arranging busing. With a commitment to informal learning opportunities like those at the Ohio Valley Museum of Discovery, children in Ms. Moquin's class typically have several out-of-school learning experiences each year. Because childrens thinking and learning are enriched when they have engaging and content-rich experiences in the early years (Moomaw 2012), these barriers are troubling.