Park After Dark

Once a year the Tohono Chul Park puts on a Park After Dark.  As you can see, there were so many docents holding live reptiles, birds, insects, mammals and anything else found in the Sonoran Desert. Here is a docent holding a Mountain King Snake.

This little snake eats rattlesnakes.

Our friend, Tommy, came with us.  (the boy, not the tortoise.)

Here is Luke with his idol, "Karl the Bugman."  Karl was holding and playing with a scorpion!  Ack!

This Great Horned Owl is missing an eye :(

Elf Owl!  I want to keep him in my pocket!

Bat Lady.

Poor little docile brain damaged bobcat.  The docent was opened for questions and one kid kept asking, "would it eat us because we are meat?" and "could it kill humans?" ....no and no.

Hazel was there touching all of the animals too but I never got a good non blurry picture of her, so here she is eating some animal crackers from earlier that day.

Ashing

This first picture I had to take so that I will never forget how stylin' Isabel has to be when we go to the pool. That is her pool outfit. The sundress, shawl, glasses, kerchief, towel/backpack and snorkel. Sheesh. Wednesday we had our art history class. As you can see I am getting lazy with the hand out, but they are still learning a lot. They have learned about nine artists and can tell the difference between their styles.

Pablo Picasso -his full name: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso -1881 to 1973 -Spain -abstract and cubism -Guernica inspired by Spanish Civil War

Afterward they worked on a picture mimicking Picasso's "blue period" by using blue (of course) and making it look sad. Luke's is a sad alien and Isabel's a sad girl. Today I took Luke to a desert insect class at the Springs Preserve. It was great, he asked a lot of questions and I learned more about insects than I ever wanted to know. Have you ever thought about how insects breathe? Pretty interesting. Luke got to watch as the zoologist let a grasshopper go.

Lately Sylvia will make up a word and then ask me what it means.  Today Sylvia asked me what "ashing" means.  I said I don't know.  She said, "Well, maybe it means you want to take a shower and your family bees mean to you."  Me: "oh."  (what do I say to that?)

Nature Exchange

Today we visited the Nature Exchange at the Springs Preserve.

Isabel pressed a hollyhock and wrote this report on it.

At the Nature Exchange, kids can bring in something from nature, a rock, shell, leaf, et cetera, they get extra points if they have researched and written about it.  They then can use those points to "buy" something in the store that another child has brought in.  I didn't get a picture of Luke with his, but he caught two wasps and wrote a report on them.  The volunteers there were wonderful.  One of them is a retired gate teacher.  I was a little worried that Luke and Isabel might not have done it "right" or might have been discouraged in some way but these wonderful women know how to fuel the natural curiosity and excitment in children about nature.  Luke asked so many questions and they got out scorpions, tarantulas and anything he wanted to see and talk about.  Here Luke is telling her the story about how one of the wasps he caught because it landed in Sylvia's bowl of oatmeal.

Their reports get put up on a bulletin board and later into a binder.  Isabel picked out a branch with two pinecones attached and Luke got the exoskeleton of some scorpion or spider thingy and a huge wasp.  The woman there encouraged Luke to buy an insect box to pin and store his bugs.  Anyone know where I can pick up one of those?

Here is Isabel learning that there are male and female pinecones...who knew? not me.

A fun magnifier thingy (that's the scientific word I made up for it.)

Sylvia has been planting vegetables in the yard with Joey.  Last night she was able to pick a couple for dinner.  Here are a few things that Sylvia has learned today (or at least that I've tried to explain to her.)

- You can NOT cut things longer. -  becoming a Cheerios box when you grow up is not a good career option. -You can't marry your baby sister. -No matter how much you want to wear Pull Ups again, because they have cute cartoon characters on them, you can't "grow down."