No matter how busy life is, I find myself jumping at any and all opportunities to volunteer on school field trips. Now that the girls are in their second semester of kindergarten, there is not a need for parent volunteers during normal school days anymore, because the kindergartners have grown to be much more independent than they were at the beginning of the year. Yes, one of those bittersweet moments…..watching our children spread their wings and ready to fly, yet, we so desire for them to need us just a bit longer…
A few weeks ago, there was a kindergarten field trip to Hidden Villa, an organic farm in Los Altos Hills. Both Mimi and I eagerly signed our names up as chaperones, and got to enjoy a wonderful morning with the girls and their classmates.
We split up into groups, and our docent, nicknamed Starshine, was fantastic. She definitely knew how to speak the kids’ language, and fed all of us an abundance of information on the animals we visited. She also had a keen eye, and often spotted interesting things to see in the nature, such as banana slugs.
While we were outside the pig pens, we had a rather traumatic experience! One of the pigs woke up and started moving around his pen, probably in search for food. A not-so-smart chicken happened to be in the corner of the pen, hatching her single egg for the day. With one quick movement, the pig scared the chicken away and immediately gobbled down the egg. We watched in horror as the chicken tried to save her egg, but couldn’t. The kids kept asking if pig had eaten the chicken’s baby.
After visiting all the animals, we ended up in the organic garden, where we learned about the 6 plant parts–roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds.
The tour ended with some dried persimmons for us to try, and it was by far the best dried fruit I’ve had. Since then, my sister and I have been searching high and low all over town for dried persimmons, and finally found them at the grocery store in Stanford Mall! 🙂
All in all, we enjoyed our visit to Hidden Villa tremendously. I love seeing the kids learn outside of the classroom, and look forward to chaperoning more field trips in the future…
