A Trip to the Zoo

We had a great trip to the zoo today! One of the things that made it so fun was that I never looked at the map. I let the kids navigate and determine how long to spend in each section. So many times we are guilty of taking the kids to a "kid" place like the zoo or a theme park and rush them through with a we have to see everything, do everything, get our money's worth kind of attitude. It was fun just to let the kids set the pace. I was there for adult supervision and photo-taking. We backtracked several times and got to see animals after they woke up later in the day.

Elana got to come with us. We decided this was a science/art field trip and we all brought our sketchbooks to do lots of drawing. I enjoyed sketching with them. They didn't need any practice acting like monkeys, but the monkey exhibit was very cool! I think everyone liked the noisy gibbons most of all.

We had a fun picnic and went back into the zoo for some more exploring.
I was kind of surprised at how Daniel got into all the sketching too. Of course the art teacher in me really loved all this drawing! There are so many reasons art and science are such a beautiful mix -a huge part of both is just learning to be observant.

What a great day! To top it all off, we had the most perfect weather - and we went to Sonic and got slushies. You just can't beat that kind of a day!