A night tour is fun, unless it is raining or the animals are off exhibit!

One of the key characteristics of everyone in the Education Department is flexibility.  Of course, I don’t mean that we are all gymnasts.  (Although we do have two former cheerleaders and several former dancers on our team.)  I mean that the education staff are each creative enough to make it work when things don’t go quite as planned.  For every program we offer, there is at least one element of unpredicability.  

We have several on grounds programs that involve a tour of animal exhibits.  For Wild Wheels and Senior Safari, this may mean that one of the featured animals for the week is off exhibit or impossible to see.  Our Wild Winks overnights sometimes have a bigger challenge: the morning tour is before the zoo opens, and this means that every exhibit may display a cleaning keeper instead of an animal. 

Another element of programs that can turn into an element of surprise is booking.  Programs like Camp Zoofari and Safari School are individual registrations, making them a bit more predictable, but for groups that reserve programs we may end up with something different than what we expect.  For field trip programs, especially Adventure Classes, the biggest obstacle is usually number of students.  Our two classrooms are limited by fire code to a small group size, and if a school books one program for more than one class, we may end up having to change either the schedule or the location at the last minute.  Size is not the only piece that can be unpredictable; age can be as well.  We tailor our programs and curricula to the age group we expect, and if a Scout group or Wild Winks turns out to be younger or older than requested we may have to get really flexible.  

The variability of weather in Houston can also present its own challenges.  Our field research program at Texas City Prairie Preserve, Camp Zoofari, and Wild Winks are the three programs that require the most flexibility when the weather changes.  I’m not just talking about rain, either; rain we can handle.  Getting a little wet never hurt anybody.  Lightning and thunder, however, can cause some serious damage and force us to restrict our classes to the Education Building. 

ZooMobiles are a special brand of the unknown; unless we have been to a location before, we can’t predict much about the site, the setup, or even the class.  Sometimes what the group requested and what they are expecting are even different.  We’ve had programs where we were expecting to do 4 half-hour presentations and they wanted 2 hour-long programs, trips when we’ve packed to present Habitats and then have to change to Texas at the last minute, and even events where we planned for a festival table and what we ended up doing were back-to-back assembly programs! 

What a festival table should look like, as long as there's actually a table.

While there are big things that we know are unpredictable, sometimes it’s the little things that can be the biggest challenge.  I arrived once at a festival ZooMobile, which is basically a table of biofacts and a few handling animals, to discover that the event had run out of tables!  The Docent volunteer who was with me and I got out a few large biofacts to hold, and took turns handling one animal at a time.  A younger group on a Wild Wink overnight had gotten settled into the classrooms to sleep only to realize that the mounted animal biofacts that are kept in the rooms were too scary, and the whole group had to move into another room. 

The little surprises can’t be predicted, but we can prepare for some of the more common challenges.  We always include multiple animals in our planning for the “touring” programs, so even if one animal is not visible, hopefully others are.  There is spare food available for overnight programs, in case someone with a dietary restriction attends without warning.  And our biggest preparation is simply knowing that things may not go as planned, and a flexibility to make quick changes that is a key part of who we are as educators, and as the Education Department.

The Houston Zoo's very own ZooMobile!

As the month of February ended and Spring Break came near, the Education Department’s schedule filled up very quickly. It’s spring which means lots of school fieldtrips and lots of ZooMobile program requests. As an Education Specialist at the Zoo, in a 5-day week you may do 4 ZooMobiles (each could be about 5 hours long including drive time), 3 Adventure Classes and even Safari School! Phew! It makes me tired just thinking about it, but we do it because we love it, and we know that educating children about the critical nature of our earth, wildlife and natural resources is imperative. Some programs are smoother than others, sometimes things just don’t seem to go your way but you deliver the best program you can because you know the kids deserve it.

On one occasion at the end of March of this year I went on one of the most rewarding ZooMobiles I have ever been on. It was a Tuesday and I remember packing up biofacts with one of our docents, Marcia. We discussed which bird skulls to take, which cat furs and which mammal claws to pack up. It was like any other Zoomobile until we got in the van. Marcia began to tell me how this elementary school came upon having the Zoo out to their school.

She told me that the school we were traveling to is where her daughter is a lead teacher. Well, I thought, this will be great! We will have a teacher that we know to control behavior so we can focus on the teaching…but that wasn’t all. Marcia’s daughter is a lead teacher in a school made up of mostly refugees from around the world. From Ethiopia to Iran and Venezuela, there were students who came from all walks of life with very different backgrounds, and some with very sad pasts. As well as having a school made up of mostly refugees, Marcia told me that most classes were barely learning English. This, I thought, was not out of the ordinary for the Houston area, except that their native languages weren’t necessarily Spanish. Similar to the areas where they were born, their native languages spanned from Portugese to Korean and Chinese. My language skills extend to Spanish, and only short phrases in French and Japanese…at this point I wasn’t sure if the kids would enjoy themselves at all if they couldn’t understand a word we were saying!

 To my surprise, and completely to the contrary of what I had expected, the kids loved the presentations. We improvised in Spanish; we made arm gestures and acted out scenes of birds, mammals and reptiles. We touched furs and skulls and live animals and tried to explain the rest. What didn’t come across in words certainly came out in smiles, movements and sounds. It turns out the ZooMobile can be so much more than an hour long presentation about animals. Animals and an appreciation of wildlife can transcend from any language and any culture, anywhere.

Not only did the kids enjoy themselves, but they earned it. Unable to pay for the ZooMobile presentations on their own, teachers from their school applied for a grant in order to award their hard-working students with a visit from the Zoo. The grant paid off for the kids, and the experience paid off for me. It doesn’t get much better than that!

Written by Martha, Education Programs Specialist

A paper bongo hiding in a forest of bamboo pieces

This week’s Safari School was all about bongos.  (The animals, not the drums.)  Even though we had a small group on Wednesday, it was a fun class and the kids learned a lot.

Bongos are very large but very secretive antelope.  It’s amazing to think of something that big disappearing into the African rainforest, but they can and do on a regular basis.  In class we learned how the stripes on a bongo’s back help it to camouflage with the trees around it.  The students even had a chance to hide a paper bongo in a jungle of bamboo that they created!

We currently have three baby bongos at the Zoo, so of course an exhibit visit was in order.  Before we did that, we created our very own bongo horns out of toilet paper tubes to wear on our walk.  I wore mine, too, although I don’t think the bongos were impressed.  The kids sure thought it was funny!

Wish you’d been able to join our bongo class?  If you know a preschool student between the ages of 3 and 5 who would love a class like this, check out our Safari School page.  Next week are the last classes for fall, and we’ll be learning about turtles, making a turtle craft, and even meeting a live turtle visitor in the classroom!  And if you miss turtles, well, we have a whole new set of animals to learn about in the spring, including flamingos, okapi, and red panda.  Hope you can join us!

Koi at the Zoo

On September 16th and 19th, the Houston Zoo’s Safari School program will be focusing on these amazing animals.  Bring your toddler with you for an hour long program during which we will learn about koi, meet a fish up close in the classroom, create our very own painted fish prints, and feed the koi residents at the Reflection Pond.   So swim on over to the zoo and join us!