On February 28th, Oak Knoll Virtual Academy headed to the California Science Center to view the Endeavor Space Shuttle. They spent time in the NASA Museum exploring areas that included a command center, space toilet, food, astronaut’s personal items, and tools used on the space shuttle, as well as viewing a video of how it was brought through the streets of Los Angeles to the California Science Center. Once inside the Shuttle Display Pavilion, they got the terrific, up-close experience of walking right under the wings and seeing it from all angles. Many families said it was their best field trip yet!
On March 28th Oak Knoll's families gathered at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden for a walk through tropical green houses where they saw carnivorous plants, orchids from all over the world, and a plant that looked like a turtle! They hiked through the Australian Section on the Rainbow Dream Snake Path, then through the Madagascar Spiny Forest where they saw plants with root systems that covered a wide area with trunks and branches able to store water during droughts. They enjoyed feeding bread to turtles, ducks, and geese by the Tule Pond and then went on to the Meyberg Waterfall. Their final destinations were the Old Coach Barn and Queen Anne Cottage that belonged to Lucky Baldwin who owned 63,000 acres of what is now Monrovia and Arcadia. The students got a sense of what it was like to live in California over a century ago. A picnic lunch and field games rounded out a day of learning and lots of fun.
