RUNNEMEDE REMEMBERED

Growing up in a small town in Southern New Jersey


Tuesday, May 29, 2012

At the zoo.

I've been trying for a few weeks to get a BLOG up and I hope this works today.

"At the zoo, the great big zoo, I dearly love to watch the little monkeys.
Some are hanging by their tails from a bar, some are riding on a rail in a car.
Sometime I am wondering what do monkeys think of people while the people watch the monkeys at the zoo."

Every Monday morning (I think it was Monday) at 10:00 a.m. (I'm 99 percent sure that was the time) all work would stop in our classroom and the radio would go on.  The above poem was set to music and was the beginning of a program entitled "At the Zoo", a program sent over the airwaves especially for school children by the Philadelphia Zoo. 

We loved this program, at least most of us did, because it was a break from the tedium of sums, long division, or the dreaded sentence diagramming.

Each week the zoo would highlight one of its animals and I don't this for sure, but since I was a teacher and later learned some things, I imagine the teachers all had some sort of guide put out by the zoo so they could follow up the program with a discussion about that special animal.

Why did I remember this?  My oldest daughter came to visit me this past weekend and she and her husband and children visited the zoo, got really sun burnt (like we used to on the days we went to the zoo), but had a wonderful day watching monkeys and other animals at the zoo.

ttfn