field trip

On Friday I went on a field trip with Miller's 3rd grade class. At the beginning of the year, his (completely awesome) teacher, Sarah, made the goal of going to the Eno 20 times over the course of the year. The plan was almost thwarted when the school came down with a new rule that parents could not drive kids on field trips anymore, so the parents in our class collectively donated more than $1000 to fund the bus transportation necessary for the kids to go.

It was a pretty fascinating thing to watch - kids learning through nature, without any pre-scripted plan of what they HAD to do, no worksheets to fill out on their observations. Just learning through their own hands-on discoveries. This year one child who had never been swimming has become the kid who spends the most time in the water. Last week on their trip, Miller coaxed a ribbon snake out of the tree, and under his teacher's guidance, picked it up and held it, all on his own.

The kids, over the course of our day, captured (and of course, released) :

pollywogs
a box turtle
a baby box turtle (soooo tiny and cute!)
crayfish
a tiny green snake
two snapping turtles
a multitude of small frogs

I cannot even begin to describe how much I enjoyed spending the day out there with his class, ticks and snakes and all. Yes, it was hard for me to don something other than my standard spring/summer uniform, the skirt, on such a warm day, but I managed:-)



Miller's class of 15: