Zoo Trip

This week we were blessed to spend a day at the zoo with our friends. It turned out to be a very hot day, but we still had a wonderful time. It was lovely to enjoy an almost empty zoo now that the public schoolers have gone back to their classes. I love being able to go to the zoo anytime we please! I also love being able to make the zoo an extension of our homeschool studies. Last week we discussed several properties of matter including "living," "nonliving-natural," and "nonliving-man made." We spent our first hour at the zoo putting everything we saw into our categories. Miriam and Rebekah really remember our studies when we are able to incorporate our learning into something fun like a zoo trip; it was so much more memorable than just discussing the properties or looking in books for examples of each property. At the end of our discussion even Michael was trying to help us label every item we saw.Hands down the highlight of the day was the lion. Apparently the zoo staff took the female lion to the vet for the day and the male lion was forlorn looking for and calling for his mate. He paced his enclosure and continued to grunt and roar as he looked for her. In all our trips to the zoo we have never seen the lion move before and certainly have never hear his roar. We were all surprised that the sound he made was more of a grunty, deep bark than the loud roar we expected to hear.Rebekah figured out how to read a map, so she was our map reader of the day. She kept track of where we were and where we were going next for much of the day. Peyton spent much of the day climbing in and out of her stroller.
At the aviary we enjoyed looking for birds and walking over the giant air vents to cool down. The children had a great time allowing the air to blow their hair and clothing.
We enjoyed watching the children play several games at the zoo. They really enjoyed the life size zoo version of CandyLand. Michael's favorite is always the huge helicopter that he can pretend to fly. Another highlight of the day was getting to ride the tram from one side of the zoo to the other. At Kidzone we spent some time building tepees and forts, playing in the tiny pond, and writing on the chalk wall. The kids wished we had more time at KidZone, but after 6 hours at the zoo it was about time to head home. We saw all of the Africa side of the zoo and about 1/4 of the North America side. Such a big zoo! We can't wait to go back to see what we missed this time.

Another fun part of our trip was helping the zoo to do research on it's visitors. We were given a digital camera from the zoo and asked to take 25 images of the things we consider to be the most special things about the zoo. The kids and I all had a great time deciding what pictures to take; Miriam really took charge of the project and took most of the pictures herself. At the end of the day we got to visit the zoo offices where the children and I looked through the pictures and explained to the researchers why we choose to take each shot. They were so sweet to the children and supplied them with snacks and drinks while we all talked (though Rebekah was too busy shoving popcorn in her mouth to get into the discussion.)