Field Trip

I gotta say, I don't think I fully appreciate the humor in this Pearls Before Swine cartoon....




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Yesterday, I chaperoned Catherine's field trip to the Peabody Museum of Natural History. It was a lot of fun. This is two Mondays in a row that I'm exhausted by my chaperoning duties. It took days to recover from the NYC trip with Peter. This time, I watched over a group of four first grade girls, Catherine and three of her friends.




Here's what I learned yesterday about six year old girls:




1) Six year old girls like sparkly things. Hannah's belt was sparkly. The pyrite and quartz on display in the Discovery Room were sparkly. Even the bronze casting of a Neanderthal skull, when the light hit it from just the right angle, was sparkly. They notice and take much joy from these things.




2) They have more answers than questions. During the hour-long presentation on Connecticut wildlife, each kid was supposed to examine the dioramas on the third floor and present the speaker with one "I wonder" question about something they saw. ("I wonder how a turtke breathes?" was the example they were given.) They had no questions. They had answers, facts, trivia, and stories, and each kid raised his or her hand as high as it would go to share it. But the funny thing is, when they gave their answers, they made them sound like questions, with their voices going higher at the end.




Catherine's friend Francine was especially good at this. She's absolutely adorable -- a tiny little girl with enormous brown eyes, and all morning, she would grab my arm and look up at me and say things like, "My dad and I watch a science show every night? Albert Einstein? He was the smartest man in the world? But he's not any more? Because he's dead?"




3) They don't walk, they skip. Everywhere they go. And when they skip too fast, and a teacher or docent tells them to stop running, they somehow manage to skip in slow motion. They push their hips forward, stick out one leg in front of them, lean forward and hop onto that leading foot, fall backwards onto the other foot, and start all over again. It's a physical feat that rivals any of the exhibits on display.


4) They hug. A lot. They hug each other as they walk. They hug each other as they meet at the back side of a museum display that they circled in opposite directions, hugging as if they haven't seen each other in 30 years, rather than 30 seconds. They hug large models of stegosaurus leg bones. They hug the glass case of the really cute elephant shrews on display in the Tree of Life exhibit. They dole out hugs like Paris Hilton spends money. The hug is their currency.




So I spent the morning with four constantly sparkling, skipping, hugging, talking six year old girls. Which was not a bad way to spend half a day, when you think about it.