Zoo Fun!

Maintaining a zoo membership is a lovely thing in conjunction with homeschooling! We recently attended with a few homeschool friends, it was a beautiful sunny day - making for many hours of fun, exploring, playing and animal observation. A wonderful day!!

Lattin's Cider Mill

Last week we visited one of my favorite fall farms, Lattin's Cider Mill. We started a tour in the market house to learn about the apple cider they make and sample both cider and an apple cider donut... good stuff! Then we headed outdoors to take in the farm, feed and pet animals, enjoy some fun with friends and finish up with a little animal train tractor ride! It was a wonderful day and a perfect ending to the week - a week packed with several field trips, outdoor adventures and fall fun.

Woodland Park Zoo

We enjoyed our annual field trip to Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle during their homeschool days program. The theme this year was 'mammals' throughout the day. They sponsored many different hosts throughout the zoo sharing carts to learn from, an early day room of various mammal activities with many skulls and pelts to touch, a couple of presentations on mammals, a little toddler puppet presentation, an animal observation activity and more!

We spent the entire day up at the zoo and still did not cover the whole thing. Through the years we have visited this zoo and have never once seen ever exhibit. I am okay with this though, as I rather they take their time and learn a little along the way through the reading and guides on site. Yesterday for instance we spent about an hour in the rain forest exhibit with a personal guide walking through with us and talking with Holly about all the animals as well as his own experience visiting the Amazon for a few months, his journeys, what he saw and experienced, how she might enjoy it and asked her questions along the way to keep her engaged completely -- she LOVED it!! (Later you'll see she is doing a rain forest unit this year).

A slow experience around the zoo today offered up a quality experience!!

Northwest Trek

Monday we met some friends out at Northwest Trek for a wonderful day of exploring and learning! This park is a fantastic learning facility that has an open free roam area for northwest animals that a tram drives through and a host shares details on the animals, behaviours and area. Then you come back into the park and enjoy a zoo style interaction with animals in various habitat settings. Making for a wonderful experience!!

This day we learned a lot about the fall rut with the elk out in the free roaming area. They were in fine form and shared with us the behaviours expected. We witnessed an elk with the females, satellite elk attempting to hone in and bugling between them. It was so very cool!!! We made a point to come home and learn more on the rut, fortunately I have nature book with good information and photos.

We had a wonderful day with the kids, exploring and doing a bit of naturalist work with the kids - working on observations and transferring that to their nature journals. A great day indeed!!