Here we are on the school bus, leaving the school. Her friend Katie is in the blue shirt. She was Madie's best friend last year and still is her closest girl friend. And, Lexi is the one with the long braid. Both girls are absolute sweeties. It was a real treat to have them.
When we got there, we all (us chaperones included) got a bag of dirt that we took to the mining station to see what we had. Before we went though, I took a picture of my group with my friend Patti's group. Her son Michael is in the red to the left of Madie. He's her very best friend in the world. I've mentioned him several times on the blog. The one in red to the right, hugging her, is Gavyn and as you can tell by the picture, Gavyn likes Madie a lot, much to Michael's dismay. It's like "Days of our Lives" for 8 yr olds between those 3. It's hilarious to me. Michael adores Madie and is very protective of her, so when Gavyn is taking up a lot of her time, he doesn't like it very much. And, Gavyn likes to keep Madie's attention as much as possible and is always hugging on her and picking her up and stuff. Madie's totally oblivious to it all, but it made for quite an interesting dynamic today during the field trip.
Well, we took those bags they gave us to the mining station, where they dumped their bags into a straining thing and panned for gems. Madie got some really cool things in her bag. I saved my bag for Noah and Livie to do later on.
After they did their panning, they went back to the tables and looked at the pamphlet they gave them to see what gems and rocks they actually got. Kate kept every single tiny, little piece she had in her bag. And, she told me that with the "gold" she got (fool's gold), she would fund her mom's summer vacation. How sweet!!
After gem mining was ceramic painting. Every child got an animal of some sort. They had bunnies and butterflies, monkeys and penguins. Madie took a butterfly and painted it quite nicely.
We had a couple minutes, waiting for the rest of the kids to finish, so I took a picture of Madie with her 2 best friends. :-)
Katie even offered to take a picture of me and Madie and she did a really good job. :-) All the kids wanted to use the camera, but I only let a couple of them take some. Lexi's mom sent a disposible camera, which I thought was such a cool idea. So, not only did I have MY camera most of the time, but I carried Lexi's around too and took several pictures of her doing things, as well as give it to her to take pictures herself.
Again, we had a few minutes to kill waiting for the other classes to switch places with us (they had the 3 classrooms rotating to different activities all day), so they played on the playground. This was one of their favorites. That's Madie on the slide there.
Then we went on a Nature Walk. Our guide took us around and showed us lots of different trees. These were cut up trees and he showed us the rings and how to count them to come up with the age of them. Here are Katie, Madie, and Lexi sitting on one of the bigger ones.
But, even the biggest 200 yr old tree that was cut up could not compare to this GIGANTIC tree we saw! Look how tall it is! I couldn't even get it all in the frame. But, you can get a glimpse of the size of it. Really cool!
After the Nature Walk we had lunch, thank goodness. I heard so many kids complain about how they were "starving!" on the last 15 min of the walk. It was only like 11:30, which is their normal time to eat at school, but guess all the excitement made them extra hungry. Then we went to play some mini-golf. Madie was cracking me up. She's watched too many PGA tournaments with Pete. She was eyeing the ball and seeing how it lined up with the hole. Hysterical!!
She did ok with the golfing, but would get frustrated if I tried to help her in any way, so I just took a seat by Patti and swatted at the bugs the rest of our time in there.
They did a few more rotations - like a hayride, animal tracking, a frisbee game, etc - before they finally met Yogi. We took a group shot of Mrs. Blumenshine's class. I don't know all of the kids, because I haven't spent a lot of time in there, but I know several from K and 1st grade that Madie shared a class with. Really good group of kids there.
Tried to get a picture with just Madie, but as I got the camera out more kids started filing in for the picture. There's Gavyn again, squeezed in by Madie.
We finally got back to the school about 2:30. We gathered up our stuff and got ready to pick up Noah. I got one more picture of Madie and Michael. They're so sweet together. :-) Best buds. So, that was our busy, fun-filled day! I'm tired, but it was so great to spend the day with her. I don't often get one-on-one time with anyone but Livie. So, I really enjoyed the time I got to spend just with her. She's a pretty special little girl and I love her. :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment