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.