First field trip

Today all the kindergarteners went on a field trip to see Stuart Little, and David got to sit in the front row. Review by David, who has listened to the audiobook and has recently enjoyed doing an afterschool theater club: “I loved everything. But it was a little bit too noisy. The story was pretty happy. They just put a few things that weren’t right in the show. Snowbell was in it, and the dog was in it, but they didn’t put Snowbell’s friends in the show. The actors weren’t in costumes; they just had hats and tails like the animals. The person acting out the mouse had some makeup on for his whiskers and nose.”

When we asked David this morning if we was excited to take his first field trip, he pointed out that we had taken a family field trip before, so this was his second field trip. One lovely day last fall we drove out to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art to see the David Wiesner exhibit they had up, and David had discovered their fantastic art projects room. We had labeled it a field trip because it happened during school hours, and he remembered that even though we’ve been back since then.

He has been back to the Carle Museum a couple of times, most recently last weekend when he got to meet R.W. Alley, the illustrator of all the Paddington Bear books for the last 20 years. But those weren’t field trips, because they didn’t replace school time.

Today, though, his whole class was there for the field trip, as were all his teachers (and only a few parents). They took school buses, and everything ran later than scheduled, and snack time was thrown off, and there was noise and chaos, and they returned to school late and had to eat lunch in their classsroom, and really it was a classic field trip experience.