Yes, it’s true. I was a chaperone for the first grade field trip last week. And lived to tell the tale. So did the 5 boys in my group.
We went to the EcoTarium in Worcester, an excellent choice for kids of this age (6-7 years). There’s enough to do to keep them busy for a few hours, with enough variety that every kid will find something to interest him, but the place isn’t so big that you’ll lose track of your kids. Even if they are running in two or three different directions.
The teachers were also very smart. We had a list of animals to look for, which kept the kids moving along as they wanted to spot as many as they could.
Here are some of the highlights of the day. More pics on Flickr.
My field trip group. Douglas is the first one on the right left. I “whited out” the names of the two boys whose name tags were also visible using an open source graphics program called GIMP that my brother recommended. He said it has the functionality of PhotoShop without the cost. I’ll report more as we investigate it.
They had a whole exhibit about insects that eat blood — leeches, mosquitos, ticks and so on. As you can probably imagine, 7 year old boys thought that was cool. One of the best bits was the game of twITCHer. In the second picture above, Douglas had a case of red eye. I removed it with a simple photo viewer called IrfanView, also a discovery of my brother.
It was a cool day, so the polar bear was actually out of his den. This is a color, unedited photo, but I managed somehow to get just the bear and the rocks, without any of the colored balls (or whatever they were) floating in his pool. As a result, the picture is stark, monochromatic, almost severe. I really like it because I think it conveys what a polar bear really is. Not a happy fluffy cartoon that sells soft drinks. A serious, deliberate survivor.
Tags: EcoTarium, IrfanView, polar bear
