Field Trip!
We went on a field trip to New Leaf with Mr. Raugi’s class (Lynnaea’s teacher) on Thursday morning. There were several other parents there. It was a nice sunny day to take a walk. We went down Branciforte to Soquel, and then up Soquel across the bridge directly to New Leaf, with Gunilla leading the way.
This is a fourth grade class, and the kids are adorable, super-energetic, and still very interested in everything going on around them. I didn’t detect a single bad attitude among any of them. Very impressive.
I looked at the statistics for B40 from a couple of years back… less than 7% of the teachers were male! I don’t know if that has changed much (don’t think so), so it is quite a coincidence that they both have male teachers this year… which I think is a good thing, they’re both very good and dedicated individuals, and it gives the girls positive male role models/authority figures that are outside of their immediate family.
They had the parents doing the various presentations (four groups, four sets of parents). Gunilla did the animal identification exercise with all the kids (look in the meat cooler to identify the pieces that come from the critter in the photo, tell a fun fact about the
critter). Did you know that clams are the longest living creatures on the planet, and that it takes 100 years for a deep sea clam to grow 0.3 inches?!? :) Or that shrimp have their hearts in their head?!?
I was the designated photographer (Gunilla is going to do a montage like she did for the San Juan Batista trip she drove on). There was also an “identify the stuff that came from the cow” exercise… Elmer’s glue = ick. Everything from bandaids to photo film to paper has cow bits! Shows how hard it is to be a vegan!
It felt a bit odd, given that I’m a vegetarian, but oh well. Gunilla was her usual enthusiastic and animated self. She’s a natural with kids.
The kids loved it… there were four sets of exercises (including something to do with apple juice), but all they could talk about afterwards when the New Leaf staff person reviewed the results were the animal facts. :)
We strolled back to the school at about 11 o’clock, and boy were my legs tired… the amount of energy kids that age put out is astounding. We could barely keep up with them! The kids got there so far ahead of schedule that the teacher decided to give them a spelling test! :)
Parenthood has it’s privileges.
