Olivia has spent the 6 months doing a science curriculum through Queen Homeschool called Our Animal Friends. It is part of their Discovering Nature and Science series. Each week there was a continuing story to read. This book is about a girl who lives next door to her uncle who is a veterinarian. She learns through talking to him about many different kinds of animals. After each story portion there are four lessons that require her to do further research and learn herself about the type of animal discussed. We allowed her to use an internet based encyclopedia as well as some other internet sites to do her research. This was a bit of a hard decision for us as we were not sure about setting her free around the internet. But she had pretty strict guidelines about what she could do and we were close by. We actually invested in a subscription to the Encyclopedia Britannica online so as to avoid the popup ads which are really the main problem and distraction that we ran into. Olivia really enjoyed all the animals she learned about. The last chapters talked about animal careers. We have friends that have a veterinarian practice in downtown Greensboro and they graciously allowed Olivia to spend the morning there. John is a talented vet and he was just wonderful teaching Olivia about the work he did.
John showed us around and let Olivia meet the various pets who were "vacationing" with him.
She got to meet Turtle, the practice's resident cat, and hear about how he had lost more than 15 pounds since coming to live with them!
Olivia got to see them remove the sutures from this poor dog who had suffered a mysterious burn, but was recovering well after surgery.
Then came the main event: A feline dental.
She got to see them put the cat under and do the cleaning part of the dental work.
Sadly, the poor boy had to have a couple of teeth removed, but it was really neat to watch.
In the end, everything turned out well and the cat was recovering nicely.
Thanks again to John and his staff for such a great time!
