A Place for Zoos

I am deeply influenced by a respect for place based education and I am thankful that our children are able to experience the Pacific Northwest through many parks with native habitats.   However our city has a wonderful zoo a within it and it has great tree canopy coverage and beautiful native plants along with the other  plants from around the world, making it a fabulous place to visit.   Even though it is across town we go many times each year- as a membership to the zoo is the incredible gift that the boys' aunt gives them.  

It is only now, after several years of visiting do I feel like my boys are really fully engaging in the experience of the zoo and getting the full educational value out of them.  However, I can't ignore that every time we have gone has helped build a terrific scaffold on which to place their experiences.
 
Why I say it is such a successful experience for them now is that the Woodland Park Zoo does a fabulous job of creating play spaces and wandering areas that allow children to reflect and synthesize what it is that they are observing.  While looking at a meerkat is nice; getting to act like a meerkat in a burrow and search for bugs to eat while also watching for predators is amazing.  This is how each exhibit is framed: observe and then perhaps climb around a statue of the same animal or wander a path contemplating what you just saw and wondering what will be around the next bend.

Our approach to the zoo is to usually only focus on one main area- or even one main animal.  If we observe other interesting animals then fabulous-- if we see just the one we are looking for that is great too!   As the children go through different  developmental phases different animals stand out.  At first we just enjoyed the farm animals and the petting area- with plenty of time to ride a tractor, pretend they are milking a cow, and trying to pump water.   Most recently our main goal was to see the baby giraffe.  It took two visits before we saw her, but en route to finding her we discovered the lions and hippotamuses.

Coming to the zoo regularly should be an experience every child gets to enjoy. It prepares them for the world and starts them asking questions about how animals and plants are connected to one another.  It teaches them about adaptations and other great vocabulary like nocturnal.  Ten years ago I remember teaching fourth grade and a very smart student of mine who was an ELL student asked me a vocabulary question during a standardized test.  I could not tell her the answer, but I knew that had she been exposed to many outdoor and environmental education experiences including regular visits to zoos and opportunities to go to camp that she surely would have know the word.  My four year old boys know it.   This memory drives me, to write, to reflect, and to act to help children and families have the access they need to real life outdoor/ nature experiences.

Age Four: Big Play, Imaginative Play

My boys are now almost 4 1/2.  They have crossed into the threshold of being preschoolers with this their play has developed.  Where once they just wanted to try new experiences, now they want to try new games, make up their own games, play with rules, make their own rules, and imagine!  It is a beautiful time.  I try to make sure that each day they get unstructured play time that lets them create their own worlds and their own play.  Lately much of their play happens on their balance bikes as they zoom around our hilly yard.  It is not so big, but there is room for loops, boards and hoses to ride over, and dirt and woodchips to land in- creating giant dust storms and practicing dramatic falls.  The boys have a neighbor friend who often comes over and adds chants and song to their rides which they echo with glee.  And today they started to have a more cohesive storyline to their bike loops.   Their bike train has turned into firetrucks.   They put out fires and fight dragons.

The "In between Times"

Today was the fifth Family Nature Playgroup that I run at our local library.  The community support and appreciation has been wonderful.  It has been a tremendous amount of work to plan the curriculum, prepare, and now facilitate the sessions. Luckily my children have been willing helpers to test activities and make art examples.  They even put up with the fact that their mom is not able to give them her full attention: Attendance has been nearly 50 at each session.  Thank goodness I work with tremendous volunteers with years and years of experience helping to work with  children and one staff person who speaks Somali fluently and has provided fabulous family support and community outreach.

 In some ways each week gets a little easier, but in other ways it remains challenging as I raise my expectations to differentiate the learning activities in more minute ways.  Since the station activities are now more or less self running,  I have been able to work on the field activities with the preschool aged children.   For the first few sessions it was only a small 15 minutes of the entire 90 minutes.  Today it ran in shifts, but included activities for large motor skills and hands on nature investigation for almost 50 minutes.   Today we did the "run and find activity" around the topic of birds.  The kids ran and found a tree they would want to make a nest in, a source of water, a cliff, and a meadow.  They also learned how to use binoculars, even though in the bright morning light and open parkland there were not too many birds to focus in on.  We played a game called "owl and mouse" and did parachute games focusing on attributes of birds and also incorporating bird calls.  At story time we shared The Fox and Crane fable in English and Somali and then I shared some of the materials from the Burke Box on Birds with the children.

All of this effort leads to great background experience for my children, but it is not nearly as magical as the play that happens when my children just have unstructured time.  It is the "in between times" when my boys have their most amazing growth.  It is when they come most into their own.  Everything they have learned from life and story and experience comes out --along with their fullest personality.

My boys, who are often quiet and contained, wrestle and chase each other and the neighbor through the yard on bicycle.  They take turns narrating their adventure yelling out challenges: " lets go through the bricks, down this trail into the garden bed, zooming around this tree.  Oh wait! A bear, drop the bikes, climb the tree.  Hungry now into the play house- make some dinner back to the bikes."

It is beautiful to watch the full exuberance of the boys' play.  The challenge is to learn to not over schedule or even get too involved but rather quietly let the play happen while I tend to something: the garden, my flat tire on my bike, or even just sit and do a few simple stretches.

I hope that all the families who attend playgroup go home and let the stories and activities from class take new shape in their youngsters. The "in between times" are as important as all the activities.

Picking Blueberries

  We are lucky that only a short drive from the city is a wonderful U-Pick Blueberry Field.  The boys and I started picking berries in the wide and maintained areas of the patch and then headed deeper into the field where we had to duck and dodge stray blackberry vines but were able to find a plethora of delightful berries.  We had a wonderful time.  

Furthermore, since we started going years ago we have built a tradition that includes grandparents and family recipes.   A favorite book about berry picking is Blueberries for Sal.