Monday, April 12, 2010

A visit to ZSL London Zoo.

I went to the zoo with one of my service users for the second time today as we didn't get to see all of it the first time we went there. You could spend an entire day at that zoo and probably not see all of it!

Getting to London Zoo can be a bit of a lengthy trip if you don't live around the area, but it is certainly worth a visit. I was a bit dissapointed that there weren't any elephants and panda bears, but there were meerkats, otters, okapis, insects, reptiles, camels, bearded pigs, lots of birds, gorillas, and llamas!!! A zoo is never complete without llamas.

So my service user and I visited the bits we didn't see the last time and we also took a short stroll around some of the areas we'd been before. I was telling him what the animals were called, what sort of family they belong to and what skills they have. All that info I read off the walls and signs at the zoo, of course! So I'm telling my service users that tigers and lions pounce on their preys and bite their necks, monkeys like to climb trees, llamas spit if you get too close to them, camels molt in the spring, spiders spin webs, etc.

On the way to the bus stop I asked my service user what he saw in zoo. I was hoping I had done a good job at explaining what the animals were and what they did, and I must have been great because his enthusiastic response was:

"I saw lots of different animals!"

:/