Meerkats

We went to our weekly zoo class on Monday again. This time the theme was animal enrichment and behavior. The kids got to see a young hen in a makeshift habitat and watched how she changed her behavior when her enrichment was given to her, it was meal worms and the hen started to cluck, peck at the food and walk around more so it was a good enrichment. The teacher talked to them about how to make an appropriate habitat for whatever animal at the zoo, how important it is to have the right things in the habitat and they discussed how animals do different things in the wild than they do in captivity at the zoo. In the zoo they need more stimulation, so they have toys, and various things in the habitat to play with.
Then they got to make treats for the Meerkats, they put meal worms in a toilet paper tube and then covered it in colored newspaper. Then we all walked over the the exhibit and a zoo keeper put the treats inside the exhibit. We watched how the Meerkats ran around trying to open the treats, some climbed high up to find them, J loved one of them who kept taking his treat and pushed it behind one of the big boulders and hid it.
It was a good class and the kids were so excited to see the Meerkats interacting and just being cute.
The weather was cold and rainy and we got soaked on the walk to the bus stop to come home... but it was worth it.. :)

Yesterday we stood home and relaxed, read some books, F did math, history, copy work, and used a web site on various geological features of the 50 states.
the kids have been playing so well together, usually with Legos and Lincoln logs and their new favorite game is Life After people, they use their blocks to build tall buildings that resemble some of our national monuments and then stimulate how they decay and fall down after a certain amount of time on Earth if there were no people. They all love the Movie Life After People and F and J are very excited that the new series came out yesterday...