We had planned to spend the last day of J-term hiking the nearby Happy Days Visitor Center trail that leads up to the exposed rock of The Ledges, with a finish on the connector trail to Kendall Lake. That is a really scenic hike, and Jim and I were looking forward to introducing the students to the hike. The problem was, it rained all morning. I do not like hiking in a cold rain, so we cast about for another option. We decided to stick to the park system, and headed instead up to the Cleveland Metro Parks Zoo.

I’m not sure why the Metro Parks system runs the zoo, but it is sort of a park and so makes some sense. The kids were very excited to be going to the zoo, and the rain stopped by the time we got there. Since the paths at the zoo are all paved, or the animals are indoors, we were free from mud, and the day was quite warm and pleasant to be out in. We split the group into two groups – Jim and I took a group of nineteen students who wanted to hike a little more outside, and Vicki (the other adult staff worker who helped us) took a group of six students who thought they might like to be inside more than not. Vicki took her group to the indoor rain forest exhibit to start, and Jim and I took our group around the perimeter of the zoo.

We did stop to see animals, and we even went inside for one exhibit. We saw elephants and flamingos and big cats and fish and lemurs and primates and rhinos and a polar bear. We saw a few giraffes and a zebra from a distance, and we hiked all over the zoo, although we did catch the bus to the far part of the zoo when we discovered that the main path we were on was closed for construction. We saw Vicki and her students outside at one point, which I was pleased with (since it was such a nice day for January). We were only at the zoo for about seventy-five or eighty minutes, but we saw quite a bit of the grounds in that time. It ended the hiking class on a very good note.

Mer had her students do their mini-presentations on Italy. She said they went well enough considering the students only had thirty or forty minutes to put them together. One student took the project home the night before and made a very cool painting of everything she had learned about Italy; it was very well done. Mer was pleased with her class, and has some ideas of how to improve it should she offer it again in a couple of years. Mer finished her class by watching most of the movie Letters to Juliet, which was filmed in Italy.

J-term is a fun time at CVCA. That finishes up the third year of the program, and as far as I have seen, it has gone very well.

Friday evening, Craig and Jordan (of the Social Studies Department) came over for Mer’s and my monthly “History Night,” when we watch one DVD of the series Battlefield. This month the topic was the Battle of the Atlantic during World War 2. We ate pizza and cookies and watched the show and visited, and it was a fun and mellow way to end the work week.