Lessons Learned

Today was our first homeschool zoo class. The girls finished the "homework", sent via email, and were very prepared for their individual classes.

Chloe's class was about feet. Well, it was about the prints animals leave behind. How scientist can tell if an animal is walking or running. What kind of animal (carnivore or herbivore) it is by looking at its prints. Chloe was very quiet in class today. She was surrounded by people she didn't know and her class was in the classroom (which we had never been in before). Mrs. G. realized this and picked her to answer a couple of questions. The first she didn't know. Mrs. G. was holding a hoof and wanted to know how we could tell the animal was a herbivore, something we have not covered in any of our science lately. The second, of course she knew, it was "what kind of print is this". A grizzly! That girl knows her bears! A question right up her alley. :)

Jesse's class was on conservation. And honestly it was not what I was expecting. We took a tour of certain animals around the zoo and discussed the variables that would dwindle the number of that species in the wild. Mrs. G. mentioned a few years back the lions in Africa were getting sick. I remember reading a article about it, but didn't know what had caused it. Today, she told us it was distemper. People were not vacinating their pets, the pets were spreading the disease to the wild African dogs and the lions were eating the dogs. The problem was eased by teaching people to vacinate their domestic dogs. It just shows that we really need to think of the chain of things. What we do, or don't do, really effects the world around us.

I learned that I'm going to have to figure out a plan for me to eat. There was suppose to be a thirty minute break between classes; however, we wound up with only about fifteen. We had time to eat a granola bar or a pack of crackers. But I was feeling awful by the end of Jesse's class at 1:15, fifteen minutes over. So, I before our next class I need to figure out how I can eat something before Chloe's class and before Jesse's.