We wandered around and took our time looking at everything. It gets funner and funner (is that real word?) each time I take them there. They ask more questions and seem to latch onto something new every time and especially Corbin now loves to learn about science and nature.
This time both of the kids spent quite awhile staring at the dead insect board, which I think we have always just sort of glanced at as we hurried by in the past, but this year Makelle loved the butterflies and Corbin seemed really interested in learning which insects--and snakes that were nearby--were poisonous. He also liked looking at their little color dots and finding where they live on a large map.
We watched the trainers feed the elephants and got them to do a few tricks for us, which Makelle loved. "Elephant sitting down!" "I hear it!" "Big ears!" It was fun.
We also spent a good amount of time sitting and watching the baby orangutan. He was by far the most active zoo animal I have ever seen. We sat there for at least 30 minutes and the entire time he kept running around, playing with a cup, swinging clear across the cage and back, dragging a blanket around, putting a burlap sack on his head, and the kids' favorite, poking at, jumping on, tugging on and laying on his mom and dad; clearly trying desperately to get someone to play with him. It was so funny, I could have sworn it was Corbin in there... he acted nearly identical to my child.
It is so great to do something fun with the kids, while being able to teach them at the same time. And at least for now, they actually like being taught and getting to learn as they play.
Side note I want to remember: Corbin has been working on learning his right and left lately.(I swear you would think he could at least get it correct 50% of the time, but somehow I would say his shoes end up on the wrong foot 75-80% of the time and so I am determined to teach him so I don't have to intervene all the time.) At first we tried to teach him to remember that he writes with his right hand. Then earlier in the week when he was holding a pencil and trying to trace a right path on a worksheet, I asked him to think about what hand his pencil was in, at which point I realized he was actually holding the pencil in his left hand--the opposite of what he was doing the last time we had this little lesson. So he tells me, "I don't know what hand I hold it in, sometimes this one (holds up right hand) and then when that one gets tired of writing I put it in my other hand. No wonder the boy has such horrible penmanship! So anyway we switched to learning that your left hand looks like an "L" but on the right hand the "L" is backward. That seems to be working better and he spent our zoo trip with map in hand learning how to navigate to find the next animal he wanted to see. It was pretty fun to watch him as he learned how directions work.
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