Always Ice Cream: Review and Giveaway!

Grace-Filled Writer

My daughters really enjoy using the computer, but we limit the time and limit what games they play. My girls are allowed to use a small handful of websites and a few games we have loaded on to a laptop given to us by a friend. However I’m rather skeptical of some kid-friendly sites because of the amount and type of advertising. Wouldn’t it be great for our boys and girls to have a safe, educational, advertisement-free website? I have some great news! I found one!

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These sibling sites are geared respectively towards girls and boys. The idea is to provide something safe, educational, and fun! After watching my girls play and learn for the past month I can tell you they have succeeded! As kids play the educational games they earn scoops (for girls) or gold coins (for boys). They use these to purchase pets, items for their pets, or items for their house or castle.
You can choose games within a range of grade-levels (k-8th) which is nice since no one child is exactly the same as another. The learning games span a wide range of topics including language arts, math, science, music and art, Bible, geography, history, life-skills, and foreign languages. New games are being added all the time and as students complete a level they move on to a harder level. Students also create a person and can customize it using hundreds of possibilities for skin, hair, eye, and outfit colors/styles. 
Rose has been begging me to learn how to type for several months now. She is fascinated by how quickly I am able to type and often mimics my fingers on the keyboard. Until finding Always Ice Cream I honestly thought she would need to wait a few more years before beginning typing skills. So far, this has been her favorite game.  
The typing game keeps her attention and has gradually taught her letter placement on the keyboard. Rose always wants to get to the next level and she loves the challenge! I like that she can see the letters and finger placement on the screen so she is not looking down as much at her fingers. I also like that there is an option on screen to move to an easier level. This way if she is unable to practice for a few days she isn’t stuck with a level beyond her skill. 

This particular website has been a great incentive for my girl. She knows she’ll have a chance to use Always Ice Cream when she completes her other schoolwork for the day…although, she also begs to play on the weekends as well. We still limit their time because I recognize that too much screen time is not healthy for them, but it is so nice to have such a good option for learning and reward.

Since I had surgery over Christmas all of my great ideas for things to do with my girls went out the window. I found myself happily allowing my girls more screen-time than usual because I knew they were learning and I could trust what they were doing was safe without my having to look over their shoulder the entire time.

Ideally each of your children should have their own account.The benefit to doing this is you get weekly reports unique to each specific child and you can customize each student’s account. For now we only have one, but it would be great to have an account for each of my girls. There are several purchasing options so you can choose what is the best fit for your family. 

I know you are really interested now! When you purchase your order (because I KNOW you will want this for your kids!) be sure to put my name, Melissa Williamson, into the “how did you hear about us” field during registration!

And now for the giveaway!!!!
The great people at Always Ice Cream and Clever Dragons are generously giving away a full year membership (valued ta $47.40) to the site of your choice! WOW! Enter through rafflecopter below. 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclaimer
I received a free year subscription of this product from Always Ice Cream in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review. No other compensation was received. 

Weekly Review: January 2-4

Grace-Filled Writer

School started again for us this week. I hadn’t anticipated beginning again because we were supposed to still be on vacation, but our plans were changed this Christmas. Since our trip has been postponed and the girls were starting to get a little antsy due to our disrupted holiday, I decided starting school modified would be a good idea.

I’m still restricted because of my surgery so we opted to school in the living room this week rather than the school room. The girls couldn’t believe I let them work on the floor! I know for many of you this is normal, but unless we are doing an activity school has always happened at a table. School on the floor was an unfamiliar idea!
Bigger Hearts for His Glory: Bare Bones
We are waiting to start back with history until things are back to normal. For now Rose is working on handwriting, math, grammar, and literature. She was very excited to finish her first cursive handwriting book this week and will continue with her new book next week! She also started reading a Richard Peck novel called Secrets at Sea, a Christmas gift from her great grandparents and has really enjoyed that. 


Little Hearts for His Glory: Bare Bones
Beth has been working on math, handwriting, reading, Thinking Skills, and the H Rod and Staff workbook. She continues to do really well with both math and reading. The only struggle were having is with self-control. When she can’t do something write she immediately scribbles all over the page or rips it. I remember her older sister going through the same thing at this age, but she would just refuse to work or start crying. It’s a phase we’ll get through just like everything else!
Little Hands to Heaven: Bare Bones
Grace has had the hardest time adjusting to my unexpected stay in the hospital. We’ve been reading lots of books, coloring, and cuddling a whole bunch! Grace’s grandparents bought her a Hotch Potch doll from Colonial Williamsburg for Christmas. This is a replica of an old fashioned doll used to help children learn their letters. You can bend the doll to form letters as seen on a set of cards. She really liked this doll and it’s been fun for me to make the letter shapes and have her guess them!

We’ll be doing school like this for a few weeks while I am recuperating. I hope to add in a few more things next week like spelling. Besides school we’ve also been having fun with art and playing games! The girls enjoyed drawing with their new chalk on black construction paper. It was raining and they wanted so badly to use it. This was a great alternative! 

We’ve also have a couple of slumber parties in the school room! There is nothing sweeter to me than my girls bonding as friends and sisters! 
Have a great weekend!

2013

Grace-Filled Writer

I have chosen to make some yearly goals as many other bloggers do. Whether you call them resolutions or goals there is an interesting history behind making plans to change in the new year. This article enlightened me on the history of resolutions.
So here is my list of goals. Some are new and some are just continuing what I have been doing this past year. Did you make goals for the New Year? 
2013 Goals
Personal
1. Exercise 3 times a week
2. Stick to my cleaning schedule
3. Finish reading through the Bible
4. Read 1 new book each month
5. Submit a devotional book I have written to 3 publishers.
Business
1. Keep piano lesson plans
2. Finish Deerstream lesson plans before weekend
Homeschool
1. Finish lesson plans before weekend
2. Incorporate calendar time daily
3. Regularly complete Friday art projects
4. Create 1 radio drama with the girls
5. Blog two times a week in addition to reviews
6. Have read-aloud time each day
Family
1. Try 1 new recipe each month
2. Have family game night 2 times a month
3. Plan a family adventure 1 time each month 
Marriage
1. Read through Psalms together
2. Read 1 marriage book together
3. Plan 1 date each month

Christmas in Review

Grace-Filled Writer

Christmas was…memorable. I wrote previously about God changing my plans. Little did I know there would be a much bigger change of plans just a few days after I wrote that! After being sick for several days I was diagnosed and medicated, but after about 5 days on the new medication it became apparent something more was going on. I ended up in the emergency room the Friday before Christmas.

On Saturday before Christmas…the day I had planned to bake, wrap presents, and pack for our vacation…I had a three-hour surgery. Not what I would have chosen…yet…God is good. The doctors removed a benign tumor which they think has been growing for 3-4 years. My parents, who live close by, were able to keep my sweet girls for the week and my husband has coddled and nursed me back to health.

It has been an exercise of faith for me. I feel I am very grounded in Scripture and know in my head the promises God has given us, but experiencing them first-hand this Christmas has brought me closer to my Savior. His grace has surrounded my family in ways I’ve never experienced before.

Even though I couldn’t be with my girls on Christmas Eve, their grandparents kept alive our tradition of cookies out for Santa.

They also continued our tradition of retelling the Christmas story before opening presents. Both traditions have occurred every year, and having my parents be so thoughtful to keep things as normal as possible for my girls was such a blessing to me.

The hospital staff were so kind and excited about having my girls come see me on Christmas day! They spent time talking to them and letting them know Mommy was going to be just fine.

Thanks to technology, we all got to chat with my in-laws via Skype on Christmas day!

Our church family, my piano families, and my MOPs family have provided so much food, including the mild diet I’ve been on. It just keeps coming! The have ministered to us sacrificially and have taken time from their holiday celebrations to come and visit with us as well.

These are not Christmas memories I would have chosen to have, but they have been some of the best. God’s faithfulness and grace to our family has overwhelmed me.

We started school back today…modified anyway. I’m still limited in what I can do so I sit on the couch with the girls at my feet working on math, handwriting, and literature. They have had their lives disrupted quite a bit the last few weeks, but they have been so sweet and helpful.

This year I experienced Emmanuel as I never have before.

Emmanuel…

God with us…
God with me.

Weekly Review: December 3-7

Grace-Filled Writer

We had quite an eventful week. We managed to finish up our last week of homeschool well in between family pictures, lots of meetings at church,getting my piano students ready for their recital next week, and still battling this horrible cold! Whatever is going around is finally leaving our house, thank goodness! If you want to take a peak at our family’s photo shoot click the picture to the right. We had such a great time and my favorite part was my girls wearing old fashioned dresses that use to be mine.

There is still time to enter the Grapevine Bible Studies Giveaway! Even if you are happy with your Bible curriculum, take a moment to check this out. It’s a fabulous way to to Bible study with kids in such a different way than I have ever seen! This engaging Bible study series really grabbed my in-church-since-birth girls’ attention. 
I also completed my very first review as part of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew! Take a peak to see what great resource we reviewed. It’s an amazing online resource updated daily. Every time I visit the site I find something new! Click the picture below to read my full review. 
This was our last week of school before our Christmas break. The girls have had a really hard time focusing since our houseful at Thanksgiving. I’ve been told this is the typical mid-year-slump fitted neatly in between two fun holidays. I remember this from my full-time middle school teaching days, but honestly had forgotten about it. Last year was a little different as our first year of homeschooling. My daughter and I were still figuring things out and since we started homeschooling part way through the year it didn’t feel like mid-year to us. Through it all we managed nicely this week and I feel that we finished well!
Little Hands to Heaven: Unit 10
Grace was very happy with me this week. I’d taken a couple of weeks off from her regular curriculum in order to focus more on a couple of areas with my older girls and she made it very clear that she was displeased. This week we studied Gideon, Samson, and Ruth. As usual, the Bible story was her favorite part each day! She also really liked the finger-play letter poem this week for the letter I. She learned that, “Nothings is i-i-i-impossible for God to do!” I’ve been pleasantly surprised how much she remembers from week-to-week. She can consistently tell you the sounds each letter makes. Every once in a while she forgets, but when I remind her of the finger-play motion she immediately remembers! 
She also enjoyed reading her Poingo books with her reading pen. Grace’s favorite discovery was the classical music she could hear on one page that matched a pre-recorded piece on our Clavinova piano. She was so excited and told us all multiple times that it was just like the piano. Grace plays with her Poingo books very sweetly while I teach the other girls…some of the time. Other times she has been intentionally trying to distract all of us and pay attention to her! The trouble is she is so cute and my girls are easily entertained by one another. She wants more and more lessons and still gets very frustrated with me when I am trying to train her to patiently wait. It is a process and hopefully it will get easier in the next few months!
Something Grace loves to do is cut. Her grandparents bought her a cutting book by Kumon that she can’t get enough of! We’re bought her another one for Christmas and I know she’s going to be over the moon about it! By the way, what is it about this age and rubbing her head on everything? My funny little Grace rubs her head on me, the furniture, her animals, whatever. She’s not itching, she just likes rubbing her hair. Her pictures are usually with tousled hair which I find adorable, but I’m just wondering where she picked this habit up from. She’ll even tousle it herself as soon as I’m done brushing it! 
Little Hearts for His Glory: Unit 16
Beth learned about Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection this week. This is a very familiar story to her since she has been in church since she was an infant. I’m glad she doesn’t get tired of hearing it! We should daily remind ourselves of the sacrifice God made through his Son, Jesus. For my girls this is just something they have always known. I’ll never forget hearing my husband tell my girls the day they were born that Jesus loved them so much that He died to save them, then singing Jesus Loves Me. 
Beth continues to enjoy spelling and does so well with our All About Spelling curriculum. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to start this in Kindergarten, but for Beth it has been great. I like that she’s now learning how to write sentences as part of the curriculum. It has been a great followup to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. You can see her here segmenting words into their sounds. It has continue to strengthen her reading skills in addition to teach her the foundations of spelling.
 Beth is our silly girl. She loves to spin a good story and make us all laugh. Most of the time my girls look very studious in their pictures…and I’ll admit that I’m blessed in that they are very easy to teach! On this day Beth was very wiggly and was excited to take a silly picture after her working picture!
Bigger Hearts for His Glory: Unit 17
After I realized Rose was ready to work full-speed through her curriculum this year I had the goad to finish Unit 17 by Christmas. We did it! She has loved learning about early American history and this week we studied Daniel Boone. She particularly likes Stories of Great Americans by Edward Eggleston. It is an older book, but very readable for her. These stories are intended to be read aloud, but since she is reading several grade levels above what I expect she enjoys reading this on her own. 
Rose also learned carry subtraction this week! I was nervous teaching it because although I understand these math concepts I’m not always the best at explaining them. I did a couple of practice problems on the board, explaining along the way, then she did a couple on her own. She confidently completed all the problems in her book without a problem. I’m so proud of her!

She will soon complete her cursive handwriting book. She is not yet able to comfortable in cursive for all of her assignments so I’m going to have her work in the next book when she finished after the Christmas break. She is doing well with letter formation and I want her to feel confident as she transitions into entirely writing in cursive. I really like A Reason for Handwriting because the lessons are so short, yet have taught her cursive so well!

This picture is for anyone wondering how our school room looks while we’re doing lessons…
As you can see, we like to spread out!
I hope you all had a great week as well! I’ll still be posting our weeks in review, but they will be filled with all the fun stuff I hope we get to do! 

Family Pictures

Grace-Filled Writer

A very good friend did our family pictures for us this year. I couldn’t have been happier with them!

Rose – 7

Beth – 5
Grace – 3         

My girls got to dress up in old fashioned dresses for part of the shoot. The Beth and Grace (the younger two) are wearing dresses my great-grandmother made for me when I was little. Rose is wearing a beautiful dress her grandparents bought for her in Williamsburg. 
And this one just captures their personalities amazingly well!
This is another of my un-posed favorites!
I really love the new style of photography. I like posed pictures, but there is something so natural about the photography trends right now that appeals to me. These were shot at a beautiful state park close to our home with historical buildings. I already have ideas for next year…

Schoolhouse Teachers: Review Crew Review

Grace-Filled Writer
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I really love our homeschool curriculum, but there are moments when I feel the need to supplement, or just want to try something a little different. Sometimes a particular concept may not click with my girls, or perhaps we just need a break from the ordinary. SchoolhouseTeachers.com  from The Old Schoolhouse Magazine is a great resource which can act as an entire program or be used to supplement your current program. It has material for all ages, pre-k through high school. For $5.95 per month (The first month is only $1.00!) or $64.26 for the year, this is really an incredible investment.
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In addition to lessons on every subject there is a wealth of information and encouragement for homeschool parents. For each month of membership you gain access to a new set of E-Books including unit studies, resource books, and encouragement for homeschooling parents. Twelve new books are available after each month of membership. Wow! I have gained a new appreciation for these resources as we have chosen to stay on the homeschooling path indefinitely. We’re open to God’s leading and for now we are being led forward. I appreciate knowing I have these types of resources at my disposal.

The site is very neatly organized by grade level and subject making it extremely easy to navigate. The only difficulty is deciding which content to use first! I was immediately drawn to the math section because math is not my strongest area. I appreciate so much about this section! My daughter enjoys using these worksheets to practice her math facts. She’s smiling because she was excited that she knew all of the facts she was practicing!

Here are just a few things I’m liking…
1. Each month there are lessons for several grade levels
2. There are videos explaining the concept
3. Practice worksheets are included along with the videos
Another favorite area is the Dailies section. Here you will find daily work ready to print. There are daily exercises for grammar, math, writing, handwriting, spelling, science, geography, and history. In addition you can also find recipes here. What busy mom couldn’t use that?

Also in the Dailies section are some fun printable games for my girls. This is a new feature and the current games are focusing on phonics and spelling patterns. This is perfect for my oldest girls who are working on spelling patterns in words currently. They had a lot of fun with these word searches!


The girls really liked this word search style game. They took turns looking for Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words.

Honestly this site has more than I can cover in this review! Click the picture below to see some samples!

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Disclaimer
I received a free copy of this product through the Schoolhouse Review Crew in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review. No other compensation was received. 

Week in Review: November 26-30

Grace-Filled Writer

I can’t believe November is gone! Now that Christmas is here don’t miss out on the chance to win the Birth of Jesus Grapevine Bible Study!!! You can check out my review of this Bible study here. I think you’ll really like what you see.

Our week was…completed. There is something about this time of year that makes it hard to get through school. I remember this same feeling of a slump when I was teaching full-time just after we got married. I don’t think it helped to have all of the previous week off from everything. There is nothing like a week without routine to make getting back into routine feel rather blah. Yet, we made it through, the girls learned, and they completed their work well.

Little Hands to Heaven: Week Off

 I decided to give Grace another week off since it was clear that this wouldn’t be the easiest to get through. She spent her time practicing (or rather pretending to practice) piano…

…and helping her sisters complete their lessons.

She didn’t seem to mind the week off until Saturday when she begged for lesson time. We opted for a trip to visit Santa Cow instead!







Little Hands for His Glory: Unit 15

Beth almost always wants to do her math first. She jumps right in and doesn’t like to wait for directions. For now it’s not a problem because it is very self-explanatory and she isn’t learning new concepts, but I’m trying to train her to wait so that she doesn’t get frustrated as her work gets harder.

She really likes spelling and especially writing down the words. She continues to amaze herself at being able to spell as well as she does. It’s a lot of fun to see the wonderment when she realizes she gets it right!

Do you notice her choice of colors for clothing this week? My Beth is all about dressing for the holiday! Her Santa skirt is her favorite thing right now!




Bigger Hearts for His Glory; Unit 16
I decided not to go back and do the units I accidentally skipped. There were some fun activities I may want to revisit, but for now we’re just going to forge ahead.

We began a unit on The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe for literature. Rose is extremely excited to study this book. We’re taking it slowly, although she’s begging to read ahead. We’re exploring the elements of literature including character, setting, plot, and conflict. It is pure joy for me to see her devour books like she does!

This week she also learned which states made up the 13 colonies, where they are located, and their abbreviations. She’ll eventually learn this information for all the states, but this was a fun geography lesson. She liked being quizzed on them after we learned them.

Overall we had a good week even if it wasn’t as exciting as most. I have a new camera now after finding out that it would cost as much to fix the old one as it did to buy a new one. I wasn’t excited about that, but I do like the compact nature of the new camera.

We have one more week of school before taking a break for the winter. I’m hoping to make next week exciting for the girls. We decorated for Christmas this year late, but it finally got done! We are typically decorating the first week of November, a tradition we started when we were living in Florida. We’re not complete done, but there is a fairly heavy dose of Christmas in our house now!

Grapevine Studies: Review and Giveaway!

Grace-Filled Writer
I’m always looking for new ways to share the story of Christmas to my girls. We love Christmas and they have heard all about it since they were first born in various forms. My girls can recite it backwards and forwards, and even enjoy acting it out with their toy nativity sets. They love the meaning of Christmas, and I don’t want it to become so familiar that they lose the wonder that God with us still holds for me. 
I had seen on several homeschool blogs that there are a lot of families using Grapevine Bible Studies for their Bible curriculum. Our base curriculum has Bible woven into everything so I hadn’t looked outside of that for Bible studies for my girls. They get a lot of additional Bible at church through Sunday school, the church service, children’s church, AWANA, and family devotions, not to mention our day-to-day conversations. Yet I was still intrigued by the rave reviews I kept hearing about Grapevine Bible Studies. 
After checking out their site I was further intrigued and I liked the idea of how the studies were laid out. I think the idea of a timeline for Bible stories is a great way to help kids make connections in Scripture. So many times the story is divided into small, teachable chunks, but not always connected together. Timelines really help all of us see the flow of the entire story. I also like that the timeline is revisited frequently throughout the study, which lasts for several days. I adore the stick figures. My girls enjoy drawing people and are already all about stick figures, so this was a great way to move them into a new way to study the Bible. 
With Christmas approaching so very quickly I was running out of time to find a new way to present the story of Christ’s birth. This seemed like a great opportunity! The multi-level version of The Birth of Jesus was a great fit for us even though my girls are young. Both Rose and Beth are reading well above their official grade-levels (2nd and Kindergarten) and are so steeped in Scripture and theology that it was a natural fit for them.
Gathering supplies was a breeze. One of my favorite features of my Kindle is being able to access pdf files without needing to print pages or use my computer. I only needed to print the student pages for my girls, pick up a Bible, make sure the girls had some colored pencils, and pull out my whiteboard markers. Talk about easy! This is about as effortless as a Bible curriculum for kids can get.
I love how simple the layout of the lessons are. So many times I find myself rereading curriculum for clarity, but these studies are very much open-and-go style. Although I did read and review the lesson before teaching it, everything was so clear I could have taught this without any preparation.  
When the whiteboard markers came out Rose, Beth, and Grace were convinced this was going to be good! I’m not sure why the white board is so impressive to them, but they eagerly sat down and couldn’t wait to get started! 
I didn’t have different colored markers, but I told them which colors to pick for the different characters they drew as we went studied through the Birth of Jesus. As you can see, you don’t have to have great artistic ability for this to succeed! 
All three worked diligently although each insisted on taking a turn erasing my pictures!  Rose enjoyed answering my questions about the story and drawing the pictures, but she kept trying to jump ahead. She started adding extra details to her stick figures as she waited for her sisters to finish up. 
The stick figures are very simple to make and yet clearly represent the key points in the story. My sweet three-year-old, Grace, did an amazing job with this. She has been drawing pictures of people for a while, but I was very impressed with her ability to follow the directions for drawing. She was the first to lose interest, but she is three after all and this is geared for older kids. She thoroughly enjoyed being included in this!
My middle daughter also did quite well. She is in a phase where she gets frustrated when she doesn’t get something perfect. This was good for her because she felt from the start she could succeed. She was very particular about copying my drawings exactly. Her favorite part to draw were the baby bumps on Elizabeth and Mary. She even put a smiley face on one of the bumps because she was sure Jesus was a happy baby!
Grapevine Bible Studies are a great way to engage students of Scripture for many ages. Although my girls are young, I am sure this would be fun for older students as well. It definitely gave me a new way to teach the familiar story of Christmas to my girls. They were so excited they eagerly retold what we had learned to the mother of one of my piano students. It was great to see how they could narrate the story in their own words to someone else and be so very accurate in the order! 
Now YOU get a chance to win this same Bible study for your kids! There are several ways you can enter through the rafflecopter link below.
Although there can be only one winner in the giveaway I’m excited to provide you with a special page of deals you can only reach through this site! Check them out here!!!
Do you want to try Grapevine Bible Studies before you buy? For a limited time you can download the lesson The Announcement to Mary for free! 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclaimer
I received a free copy of this product from Grapevine Bible Studies  in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review. No other compensation was received. 

Field Trip: The Zoo!

Grace-Filled Writer

One of the great things about homeschooling is the freedom to take field trips as a family to the places we want the girls to experience. I have a whole list of filed trips both local and far away.

We have a really nice children’s museum where we get free admission after lunch on Wednesdays. Our library also often has things for kids. My girls really feel like a trip to the library is a field trip even if there isn’t anything special going on!

Sometimes we like to make day trips. We bought a season pass for which is about an hour and a half away from us. We made our most recent trip on a Friday. It was great! The last time we went it was crowded and sweltering. The fall provided a beautiful day with only a handful of other families.

The girls really like the North America area. So many of these animals are found near us and they enjoy seeing them up close. This is the first time we’ve been able to see the black bears and they were fascinated!

The girls really like taking pictures with the various animal statues. Some are small enough to climb on, but others are a bit larger as you can see! While I appreciate the effort the zoo puts into making sure their statues are accurately portraying the animals, I have learned to strategically place children in order to make our photos a little more family friendly!

92008X: Zoo Guide: A Bible-Based Handbook to the ZooWe want our girls to have a biblical world view and we believe the biblical account of creation as told in Genesis. This creates a bit of a problem when we want to go to a secular zoo or museum. I stumbled across this zoo guide from the people at Answers in Genesis last year. Not only do I appreciate the content, but the pictures are beautiful! My daughters love reading it for fun while we’re at home and I love that we can take it with us to the zoo. Since learning to read my oldest two daughters absorb everything they read and I am finding myself working to train them to be discerning more and more. You can click the link below to find out more information!

We were excited to get to walk the Dinosaur trail as well before it closed for the season. The dinosaurs are animated and noisy too! The line during out last visit was much too long to enter the trail, which costs a little extra. Because there were fewer people there the girls walked back and forth through the trail a few times. Sadly, this is when my camera flash sparked and blew out. I was glad I had taken most of the pictures I had wanted already. 
So our day was a success and we decided from now on we will only visit the zoo during the fall, winter, and spring…no more sweltering days for us!

Here are my ratings on a 10 point scale…
Family Friendly: 10
Kids Engagement: 10
Likelihood to return: 10 (We love our season passes!)