The Desert Botanical Gardens does homeschool tours. Very nice, in theory, just the way school get to go on tours. D, C and B were all in the Desert Buddies Tour, learning who helps who in the Sonoran Desert. They were very excited that some friends were taking the same tour. We learned about saguaros and how they provide homes after woodpeckers create a hole which forms a scab, called a boot, for little animals to live in. The kids measured the temperature above ground and below to see why many animals burrow in the hot desert. They learned about
how ground squirrels and mice distribute seed pods so that more plants can grow.
When the guided tour was done, we got to go into the butterfly pavilion. The kids liked watching the monarch butterflies up close and we have lots of pictures. Then they spent some time outside the enclosed space doing butterfly puzzles and looking at the stages of development with a magnifying glass. When the found out the butterfly under glass was a real butterfly - a dead butterfly - they weren’t sure how scientific killing butterflies was. Seemed a little dodgey to them.
Then we meandered our way out of the gardens . . . pretending to be a dolphin, a sting ray and an orca whale. The Desert Botanical Gardens was nice, but Sea World is still claiming their imagination.
(tons of photos in the gallery for this one)
1 response so far ↓
1 Anne Mayo // Oct 26, 2007 at 9:35 pm
The butterflies made me think of the trip that we made to the butterfly exhibit at the
“dinosaur”
museum. The NYC kids who had never seen a butterfly shrieked in terror when the butterflies came near them. Of course, contrary creatures that they are, they landed on the ones trying to avoid them and resolutely refused to come near D. who would have been thrilled to have one land on him. The flora and fauna shots are lovely. Although nothing compares with pics of the kids.
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