Colchester Zoo is our local zoo, if you can refer to something 40 minutes drive away as local. We’ve only been once before, as guests of First News when we had a fabulous amphibians experience. Then just last week I learnt via facebook that they were offering (free) home education sessions, targeted to age group, so 11-16, 5-7 and 7-11.
I booked in for Small (11-16) and Smallest (5-7) and on Monday we headed out to take part.
It’s not a bad drive thankfully, and we arrived with time for a quick look around before the first session – we popped in to check on the iguanas and tortoises.
Yes, he is lying on a radiator. I was kind of jealous. It was a very cold day.
This is my only decent shot of the tortoise. He was actually moving too fast mostly to get focus in the dark 😉
And this is the workshop we went for. On the left is Small, dressed as the ultimate predator, with his huge ears, big teeth and eyes at the front of his head. It was a really good session, Smallest got a lot out of it too, so much so that we didn’t stop for her session, which was immediately after Small’s. Shame in a way as there were a lot of younger children waiting to come in and it would have been nice for her to meet them, but after sitting for 90 minutes she needed a break.
(Tigerboy paid attention for about quarter of an hour, then played on Tiggly for a while.)
Her favourite animals. Honest. That’s a happy face.
This was cute. They move fast too don’t they?
So we spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the zoo. And it went so well that we signed up for passes, and will be signing up for more workshops. The passes are quite expensive but if we make six workshops that will bring the price down something in line with skating.
Lots of thing to do at the zoo as well as look at animals. This is a great play area, and there are several really good climbing frames, and an indoor softplay. No doubt we’ll get to explore that some other time.
Best bit of the day – we managed to arrive at the elephant house just in time to join in with the feeding. I got to feed an elephant! Smallest declined the chance, Small did it twice. Tigerboy tried, but didn’t quite manage but did get to have an elephant trunk go across his hand.
All in all, it was an excellent day out. We didn’t see more than a fraction of the animals, but that’s the other benefit of the passes is we can pop in when passing and not worry if we can’t make a day of it. I suspect it’s going to become our new favourite place.
Big birds. Handy to see them as we’d been talking about birds that can’t fly the other day and they’d come up in the discussion.
I’m really impressed that Colchester Zoo is putting on events for home educators in this way, and I’m looking forward to taking advantage of them 🙂
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