Since I teach Part-Time and most teachers seem to want Volunteers in the morning hours, May is a big school volunteer month for me. I finish up my semester at Weber State at the end of April and usually have about 4 weeks where my big kids are still in school and I'm not. So.... I sign up for all the May activities! The school does all of their field trips in May, and I was fortunate enough to get to go with both of them this year!
Daphne's 2nd grade field trip was first... we headed all the way up to Logan to go to a farm there that is sort of frozen in time around 1920. We had so much fun!
All of the tour guides wore period clothing and stayed in character... the kids loved it. Here she is in the "Summer Kitchen". During the winter months, the kitchen was the warmest room in the house, so that's where people stayed most of the time. But in the Summer, it was too hot to have the oven on all day in the house, so they had a little building out back where they kept the oven and did the cooking for the Summer months.
They got a chance to wash clothes the old fashioned way. Ugh.
This is the tour guide warning them about the smell in the chicken coop. It was the most disgusting thing I have ever smelled. Ever.
She got to churn butter! This was a shockingly painstaking process. It made me start to use the last little smears on my butter dish instead of grabbing a new stick right away. So much work went into making every little bit of butter!
And... we got to milk a cow! The kids were a little nervous, but everybody tried it! We had so much fun laughing and talking and playing on the way.
Isaac's field trip was a different story entirely. He is in Fourth grade, and they took the whole grade to the Farmington Wetlands. First of all, I didn't even know we had wetlands here. Isn't this a desert?
They divided us into groups and we each took a turn with a different tour guide. Our first tour guide was fabulous! He was a guy, and took us around to see rattlesnake skins and scat and droppings and knew just how to make it interesting for kids this age.
Here we are on his tour:
I have ZERO pictures of our second group because we were with an extremely soft-spoken Russian woman who had a milk mustache and in very broken English walked us around and pointed to different grasses telling us why they are important. I think there may have been two children who actually heard or understood anything she said. The high point (or low point) of this group was when she told the children to break off a particular piece of a plant and eat it. This is just after we learned how to spot all the different types of animal droppings everywhere. Oh, joy.
Next, we went into Verma's group. Yes, there is a woman who is actually named Verma. I don't know what her parents were thinking, but they actually named her Verma. I kept getting mixed up and calling her Merva, because that seems like it might actually be a name rather than a rodent, but she kept correcting me. Verma it is. Here is Isaac measuring his wingspan next to that of the bald eagle:
Isaac and his buddy Michael:
So Verma's station essentially consisted of several tubs of pond water and a bunch of turkey basters. She wanted the kids to suck stuff up into the turkey basters and then look under the microscope to see what the found.
Now, I am aware that I am nature-challenged. I am also Science-challenged. But this seemed like the most disgustins and pointless activity ever to me. For some reason, we were at this station for the longest time (like almost 40 minutes!!) Good ole' Merva, I mean Verma was so completely enthralled with the microscope that she never checked in the kids with the water. So... although they were pretty interested in the water for about 10 minutes, pretty soon, 10 year old boys realize they can get 10 year old girls to shriek if they are wielding a turkey baster full of nasty pond water as a weapon. So I mostly ran around trying to prevent any of the girls from getting completely soaked by one of these terrible boys.
On an completely unrelated note: the boy and girl to the right of Isaac in this picture are a "couple". They stayed everywhere together and she acted like his mother the entire time, keeping him from getting into trouble or starting a fight. I was deeply disturbed. Do fourth graders have boyfriends and girlfriends?
Our last group was with the "Mean Lady". I had noticed this woman talking to other groups in a very harsh manner and I warned the kids to stay with her so that she wouldn't yell at them. This is a woman who clearly should never be allowed to work with children. She would try to get the groups to rotate and then become overly frustrated when they wouldn't follow directions exactly perfectly like little soldiers. Then, she proceeded to pass out "BEYE- NOCKS" *something the rest of the English Speaking world refers to as Binoculars, to the children. She became very impatient that they were not doing this as quickly or efficiently as she desired. Then, she walked us all around and said things like, "If you look to your left, you'll see the nest of the Great Blue Heron". But after the first five minutes, the kids would be looking through their binoculars and saying, "I see Lagoon over there!" (Lagoon is the theme park around these parts) It was a joke. I'm not sure if they learned anything or enjoyed themselves at all, but it was fun to get out of the school for a few hours.
And now I will tell you the real reason I am glad I attended Isaac's field trip. Other than the fact that I got to spend some extra time with him, I am mostly glad that I went because after the Wetlands fiasco, we went to a park and let the kids have lunch. The children who were just playing in pond water, looking at dung and eating grass grabbed their lunches and started showing down. Not my boy. Only after I had bathed him in hand sanitizer and rubbed the park table down with antibacterial wipes, then and only then, did he eat his lunch.
I am so grateful that I got to have that time with them! It was so great to spend time with them on the bus. I was pleasantly surprised that they both wanted to sit by me, even though they are getting a little older. I'm sure one day I will look up and they are too cool to be seen with me. But for now, I'll treasure these days together; even if they are in a chicken coop or laced with filthy pond water. I'll take every moment I can get.
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