Field Trip to Mission San Jose

Last week we went on a field trip to Mission San Jose with Elina's class.  I'm sad to say that in all the years that we've lived in San Antonio, we have never visited any of the 5 missions here.  This turned out to be such a wonderful, educational field trip for me...and the kids.  It's a beautiful place full of history and interesting stories.

I was so impressed with how much the kids all knew about the missions.  Elina loves telling the story about Rosa's window at Mission San Jose.  The legend has it that a stone carver named Pedro Huizar was going to marry a woman named Rosa from Spain.  She set sail on a ship to come to the New World, but the ship hit a storm on the seas and no one survived.  He carved Rosa's window while he was in mourning.  It's funny because all the girls in the class could recite this whole entire story! Seeing Rosa's window was the highlight of Elina's trip.  She has been drawing pictures of it all week and when she finally saw it in person, she was in heaven!

This was her drawing from class--

Some other favorite attractions were the outdoor ovens and the granary.

In the end, the kids became Jr. Rangers as the Park Ranger "swore" them in.  They were all so proud to receive their badges!

For this field trip, we also had another "passenger" in our car.  We brought Flat L with us!  For those of you who don't know, there's a book called Flat Stanley where a boy named Stanley becomes flattened and then figures out that he can go visit his friends by just being sent in an envelope.  L's first grade class is doing a project where they send flat versions of themselves to friends/family near and far. (Elina gets to do her Flat Stanley project next semester...I wonder where she'll send her Flat Elina...hmmmm.)  L wanted to send her Flat L to Elina and we are thrilled to have her visit!  So this month we have to take her to fun places and take pictures with her.  It's going to be lots of fun!  We just wish the real L (along with her parents and siblings) could come visit us!!  This was Flat L's first outing and she seemed to really enjoy herself.  Can you tell?

We're definitely going to return to Mission San Jose...and I want to try to visit the other ones as well.  Honestly, I think Elina could run the tour when we take B next time.  She just had a great time seeing all the different things she learned about in real life.  What an awesome place!

Here's one of the missions projects Elina worked on in class.  They each molded salt dough clay into the riverbank of the San Antonio River where the missions are located.  After baking the clay, they painted the topography and put up each mission along the river.  She loved working on this little project!