Day 20

Today we went on a field trip to one of our favorite almost-local places.  Trevor Zoo is a zoo run by the students at Millerton School across the river from us.  It's a private boarding high school (one of the few places I wouldn't object to sending the kids to, but we couldn't even near afford it). 

A Red Panda

A Porcupine

They have over 180 animals, many exotic, some endangered.  Today we actually took part in a class for homeschoolers which was really well done.  The man who taught was really great with the kids, taking it in stride when people didn't raise their hands, either from excitement or not knowing about the whole raise-your-hand-to-speak thing (mine would fall into that catagory.  Oops.)

He discussed how animals 'make a living', either through hunting, grazing, whatever it takes for them to eke out an existence.  We learned that our jaws come in two parts, connected by ligaments, tendons and muscles.  We learned about homologous (birds of different feathers have the same parts but don't always use them the same way, such as an ostrich and a hummingbird) and analogous features (such as wings of a flying bird, a bat, and a butterfly.  They all do the same thing, but are not built the same way).

Another topic was classification.  He left us with homework (yay!) which was a sheet to fill out with all the animals of the zoo in their proper classification down to Order.  I was surprised that I could remember the names all the way down:
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

The mnemonic I was given in high school was King Phillip Came Over For Good (um) Spaghetti.
It's amazing, the things you remember. 

Anyway, even though Luke is sick, and Emily now has a fever, they both enjoyed the class, and loved the zoo.  It's not huge, but it has a lot going for it.  I love the porcupine.