Fun in the Garden

Over the summer,

I volunteered at Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. I worked a majority of my time in the Children's Garden. I spent hours doing many activites with the children to enhance their knowledge of the animals and the enviroment around them. Some activites included: dressing up as animals and teaching them the noises they made and what they ate, polishing petoskey stones, identifying what every day things are made of (example: pennies out of copper), and looking/digging for fossils. This experience was one of the main reasons of why I was so excited for AP Biology.
After the first week of the class, we learned about animal behavior. This past weekend I worked again in the children's garden and I payed close attention to how the many animals interacted with each other. There were chipmunks and squirrels that interacted together. It was interesting to watch how these two animals collected their food and navigated through trees. I feel like this class is going to help me to appreciate nature more, and most importantly---pay attention.
In my opinion, the human race as a whole is blind to the beautiful world around us. We are either too busy checking facebook, playing angry birds, or watching a marathon of a reality TV show. Sitting in the children's garden, I was always disappointed to watch families. The little kids would always be so excited. They would run in and start shouting, "Mommy, Daddy!! Look at that! Look at me! Look at the flowers! Look at the bumblebees! Bzzzzzz!!! Mommy!? Daddy!?" The parents would barely glance their way before saying, "Mmm.. cool honey." What? To my shock, they would be on their phones texting, tweeting, facebooking, etc. I now understand the small minds of so many individuals of this generation. Many times, I would find myself interrupting families and getting the parents involved. I think it would surprise many people at how rude the parents were to me. The kids, of course, loved it. The world cannot be a better place if technology is going to be abused like this. When families plan a day in the nature, they should plan a day without technology to the social world. Open your eyes and smell the flowers! Enjoy nature. Seriously, it's prettier than technology anyways.