On my list of things to add to our homeschooling days are weekly field trips. Today we went to the Buffalo Zoo... which has been being requested by Adam, especially, but I also chose the zoo over an indoor museum since the weather was unseasonably warm... mid 50s. We can do the indoor stuff next week! We arrived at about 1:00 and without a second thought, when I saw on the daily schedule that the elephant feeding was Wednesdays at 1:30, I registered the kids and a few bucks later we had an interactive experience at the zoo... they each got to feed the elephant some celery! We were the only ones there, which was even better because they got to each feed it a few pieces! There was a little introduction about Asian Elephants and the kids could ask any questions... I had told them that they each needed to think of at least one question to ask. I love how they are not shy, and that they are just willing to dive right in. It turned out they each asked several questions and answered the zookeeper's questions as well. They thought the whole experience was super fun... and they talked about it the rest of the day! I was not planning on this, of course, when I left the house... and I deliberately left my nice camera at home so I would have less to keep track of while at the zoo... so it was all on the iphone to capture the feeding... I was not allowed to take video, though (bummer). After the elephant feeding we walked through most of the rest of the zoo. I was reminded why I prefer to go to the zoo on cooler days... the animals were all moving about! I have never seen the lion walking back and fourth along the wall... he is usually on the rock lying there... but today he never sat still! The sea lions were very active... but they usually are. The kids love to race them from viewing spot to viewing spot... it has become their standard way to watch the sea lions and guess which viewing spot they will go to. We did skip a few of the animals as Allison was way past her nap time and we needed to get going, but we saw a good portion of the zoo. The kids pretended the whole time that it was their backyard and all the animals were their pets... they gave them each names and talked about how much they play with that pet and how often they need to take care of it and any other tidbits of info that they wanted to throw in... all done "in character" with character voices and personalities. Some days, I just stop trying to keep up with them!
