826 Valencia Field Trips take classrooms on wild adventures packed with a lot of learning and culminate with bound, illustrated books and professionally produced podcasts. Our high-energy writing, performing, and storytelling Field Trips infuse creativity, collaboration, and the arts into the regular school day.
Mission Center
We offer two Field Trips at our Mission Center: Storytelling and Bookmaking, and Choose Your Own Adventure. Students in grades 2–5 come aboard our pirate ship for an imaginative adventure and are encouraged to think big and tap into their creativity. Each class develops characters and a setting, writes a collaborative story, and returns to school with a bound, illustrated storybook. Last year, we published 100 Field Trip books, and each received a glowing review from our grumpy pirate editor, Captain Blue.
By far one of my favorite and most memorable field trips in my 30-year teaching career. AND WOW!—love, love, love how 826 Valencia makes writing fun and fosters collaboration, cooperation, and focus!
— Nadya Bratt
Teacher, Mission Center Field Trips
Tenderloin Center
In Podcasting Field Trips at our Tenderloin Center, students learn podcast storytelling by brainstorming with tutors, drafting their scripts, practicing reading in front of their peers, and finally, recording their stories in our Dolby-sponsored sound booths. We publish all of our students’ podcasts on our SoundCloud page. Last year, we added a new writing project called Breaking News; students chose an important moment from their life and wrote the sequence of events as a news story.
The best part was that I got to write a poem and record it because it felt like I was an actual author.
— Student, Tenderloin Center Field Trips
🎙️ ✍️ If you’d like to support our Field Trips, you can find different ways to get involved here.