Field trip!

We went on a field trip last Wednesday. As a child, I remember these as being stressful but fun. I still feel the same way about them now. I found out we were going about five minutes before we left. I wasn't told where it was, so I felt really excited as our bus followed the signs to Children's Grand Park!...and disappointed as it turned into a parking lot for a different place immediately afterward. Anyway, that disappointment was short-lived because this was the best. place. for kids. ever. It was basically a warehouse of fun rooms for children, and we spent about 20 minutes in each one.

First we went to the glue and sand picture room, and I helped the kids write their names in English.

James was particularly proud of his shark picture.

Then we went to the sand room, featuring the finest, whitest sand ever. It also had a special place in the middle with a very thin layer of sand and an illuminated floor, so you could draw pictures and see them lit up.

Next came the grass room, which was totally incomprehensible. It involved a lot of doors opening up to show paintings and more doors. Maybe there was some kind of narrative, but it was lost on me. It was a good place for taking pictures of the students, though.

Then we went to a GIANT DRAGON MAZE JUMPING CASTLE!

For many children, this was actually terrifying. (Every child featured in this picture is crying.)

During this trip, I was casually ruminating about how different children are from adults, and how the things that once excited me (like GIANT DRAGON MAZE JUMPING CASTLEs) now make me kind of nauseated. But it all changed in the Dinosaur Digging Room!

The room was covered in the same fine white sand as we saw before, but beneath that sand were hundreds of dinosaur bones! The kids all got paintbrushes to work to uncover the dinosaurs. This brought back memories of all sorts for me, of digging holes to China and our second grade sleep-away field trip to dig up "dinosaur fossils." No one explicitly told us that the fossils were fake, and at the time I accepted my teachers at their word. Paleontologists needed the help of a schoolbus full of rowdy second-graders to find important dinosaur fossils, and I was there to help. I'm not sure at exactly what age I realized this was staged, but I was definitely in the double digits.

Seeing the kids uncover the dinosaurs, I started to get really curious. What kind of dinosaurs are hidden in this room? Are they placed at random, or if we uncovered it all would we see the skeletons in action poses, maybe fighting each other? I set to work with the 7-year-olds. I saw the tour guide kicking sand back over the dinosaur bones, and I glared at her.

We uncovered a head!

It was, necessarily, all downhill from there. All I had to teach in the afternoon was gym, which was about all the students could focus on, anyway. In brief, it was stressful, but fun.