Gone Zooing

Having fun during a pre-school program!Having fun during a pre-school program!Ah, Saturday. A day for relaxing and running errands and unwinding from the week. Unless you are me. Saturdays are my Friday and also one of my busiest days of the week. Almost every Saturday I teach two 1 ½ hour pre-school classes and one 1 hour Zoo Explorer or Eco-Club class. I have less than an hour between each class for prep and snack and recovery. You would think Saturday would be one of my least favorite days. But I love it. Let me explain.

The programs run like this: every month we learn about a new animal in ZooSchool (pre-school and Zoo Explorers) and Eco-Club spends three months studying a particular habitat. You see the same kids pretty much every month. When they outgrow pre-school at age 5 many of them go into Zoo Explorers. And this is why I love it. This is a chance to have a lasting impression on a group of little ones. I may run around like a crazy person on Saturday but this is one of the rare chances in this line of work to see the long-term effects. Going into the schools or teaching visitors on grounds is like dropping little knowledge seeds – you know you dropped them but you don’t know which ones grew. With the ZooSchool classes you get to watch the seed grow.

A concrete example of this would be “Hank”. Hank started pre-school when he had just turned 3. When he first started his dad told me he had an avid interest in animals. Most kids at this age do. Hank’s dad had no idea of the understatement he had made. Hank was like a little sponge. Every month he would come bounding into the room full of energy and excitement – looking forward to learning more about that month’s animal. Cut to Hank’s second year of ZooSchool. The topic for that month was the wildebeest and one of the activities was a horn matching game. Each child had the picture of a horn and I had the pictures of the different animals to which the horns belonged. The children would match their horn to the appropriate picture. When I held up a picture of a kudu (a type of African antelope. For the record I didn’t know what one was before this class either) Hank’s eyes lit up. “Hey! That’s a kudu! They’re in my zoo-owogy book!” Yep. That’s right. Little four-year-old Hank had a zoology book. His dad also tells me he “wants to teach about animals like Miss Tena does” when he grows up. That makes me feel gratified and humbled all at the same time.

There are so many other students that come in with the usual child-like interest in animals and leave with a love of animals and the places the animals live. Little “Lexie” saves frogs in her back yard now, according to her mother. She “has become very green” her mom jokes. I could give example after example. And this is the reason that although I leave work on Saturday exhausted it is probably my favorite day of the week. It is the one day I get a chance to see the seed turning into the plant.