Beard Elementary students gain community skills on trip to Memorial Medical Center in Modesto

Students from Beard Elementary School got a special tour of Memorial Medical Center, seeing its X-ray and emergency rooms, posing for pictures with a medical helicopter and eating a hospital cafeteria lunch.

The field trip this month served as real-world education for two special education classes, giving them a view of places they may not have seen and vocabulary they may not have heard. Other field trips have gone to the McHenry Mansion and McHenry Museum, McDonald’s, PetSmart, a farmers market, a grocery store and a fire station. Students will also deliver handmade cards on a caroling visit to a nursing home.

“It’s trying to get them to transition what they learn to the community,” said Beard teacher Marilyn Goodwin. Her class teamed up with the class of Randee Harcrow.

Called community-based instruction, the trip included a city bus ride home, learning to hand the bus driver a ticket and find a seat.

“We try to do things they can apply in life,” Goodwin said.

Speech and language specialist Paula Lentine had other goals for the visit. She asked if students understood words and explained when there were blank looks.

“They have to give us complete sentences,” she said after giving a student a prompt to finish her thought. Keeping questions on topic, responding appropriately when asked a question – all offered practice for children in good use of language, Lentine said.

The hospital emergency room bought bike helmets for the children, said emergency department manager Scott Baker. The two classes toured a section of the ER not in use on a Thursday morning. Nurse Karen Turner showed students how patients’ vital signs are monitored by attaching one to a fifth-grade volunteer.

Next stop on the tour for Goodwin’s class was X-ray viewing with tech Abel Garcia.

“We’re kind of the eyes of the doctor. He can’t see inside you,” Garcia said, showing the fourth- through sixth-graders films of lungs, hands and a skull. The white shapes were bones, black was air, and what surrounds it all but is not visible on X-rays is called soft tissue, he explained.

In the next room, another tech showed the machine that takes the X-rays. “X-rays don’t hurt,” Lisa Herrera explained, spotting worried faces.

A walk through the warmly decorated halls of the pediatric ward included a stop at the nurses station and a talk on hand-washing. Young patients are encouraged to watch movies and play Xbox, said nurse Kerry Roach.

“We don’t want people to just lay here and worry and be in pain,” she told the Beard visitors. “We want people up and moving,” she said, explaining just sitting up straighter helps kids breathe deeper.

All the students had their pictures taken in Mercy Air 31, a Bell 407 helicopter piloted by Steve Retherford, before heading back to Beard via Modesto Area Express.

This story was originally published November 29, 2015 at 5:02 PM with the headline "Beard Elementary students gain community skills on trip to Memorial Medical Center in Modesto."