A Brush With Nature at Meijer Gardens

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Meijer Gardens and the zoo hosted a Tropical Fun Fest.  They featured three animals, a bearded lizard, a porcupine, and a cockroach.  We were able to go through different stations and learn more about the animals.  There were art activities, a story, a short film, and some interactive exhibits. 

 They made cute porcupines out of black modeling clay, wire, and broken toothpicks.

 Here they are decorating their 'beards' to wear as they role-play being lizards.

 One of the things we learned about lizards is that they make different motions to other animals, depending on whether they are friend or foe.  In this room, there were animal pictures scattered around the floor and the kids were lizards, and had to do the motions after deciding on whether the animal picture would be a friend or foe to the lizard.


Apparently we were very enthusiastic in this activity, because the newspaper photographer came up to me before we left the area and asked for our names in case we were in the paper.  I immediately gave Cole and Kara's names, and was excited to think that they would be featured.  Then he asked for my name - umm?  Would it be okay to pass?  The reason I thought this is because the only thing I remembered doing was leaping from animal to animal with the kids, and really didn't want that picture in the paper.  But the man said I would probably just be in the background.  Mark looked in the paper the next day and found us - I was not in the background, nor was I leaping, so I guess it could have been worse!  Kara's preschool teacher put the picture on the bulletin board at school, and as one mom said to me "I don't know what you were doing, but you were doing it well."  : )  For the record, I was demonstrating how the bearded lizards make their beards expand to scare off an enemy.

After an hour, we all gathered back together in a large room for the zoo folks to bring out the three animals (projected onto a large screen) and share more information about them.  We were then divided into three smaller groups and each animal visited each group.

 I was pleasantly surprised that both of the kids wanted to touch the lizard. 

I was even more surprised when they wanted to touch the cockroach!  Even after a lady screamed when she touched it (hello, I would have screamed too, which is why I didn't touch it!).  Kara was so interested in the cockroach that she went and stood next to the lady while she was still talking so she could touch it a second time!  We did hear it hiss, which was cool, and did learn the most interesting facts about it (for example, they can live for several weeks after their head is cut off, and a group of cockroaches can devour a carcass in minutes - gross but neat at the same time).

There was also a porcupine, but I didn't take a picture because you had to turn your flash off and apparently I didn't know how.  And while we obviously couldn't pet the porcupine, we did stick around at the end to ask some questions, and the handler let us touch the quills that were stuck in her glove from him sitting on it.

And as a parent/teacher, it is very satisfying to hear your children ask relevant questions during a question/answer session.  Instead of 'how old are you' and 'what's your favorite color', Kara asked what porcupines eat and Cole asked how long it took for their quills to grow back after they came out.  Bravo!