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The Clark Family Adventure Part 3 – Kids Perspective

My Mum’s cousin Val is the head teacher at a school back home. She’s read some of our blogs and showed some of our photos to all the children in assembly.

They sent us some questions and these were mine:

Zoe – What do you do when you get bored? What games do you play? We are all jealous that you don’t have to go to school. How is World School school going? Have you been on any more adventures like your jungle journey to the beach?

We decided to use the questions to do our next blogs!

Zoe Clark reading. When I get bored, I have a Kindle so sometimes I read. I really like to draw or make stuff and now I have just got some new paints. We have pencils and paper. In Quito we got some scissors, sellotape and glue and more drawing paper!

I have beads and elastic too and we make necklaces and bracelets – sometimes for ourselves but often as presents. we got more Kids-Backpackbeads in Otavalo, where we visited a massive craft market. Its a place where lots of people wear traditional clothes. The men even have long black plaits! I have got quite good at plaiting! We play on iPhone apps too, or play travel games like Rumicub, Snakes and Ladders, Ludo and sometimes cards.

About not going to school – Well, I miss my friends and my teachers because I loved my school in England. Mostly I miss talking to my friends, play dates and sleepovers. We arrived in the Galapagos a week ago and had our first week of school, where everyone speaks Spanish of course. It’s pretty hard sitting in lessons where you can’t understand much but at break its fun being with my new friends.

In the afternoon we go to the English centre where local children can do English classes. We join in and help. Some of the children are at our school too. World school isn’t like school back home at all! When we had a lot of time on the boats we would do lessons a bit more like at school back home. Maths with my Dad, Geography, History, Writing or Spelling with my Mum.

We found out about the Amazon while we were on the river – and learned lots of new stuff. Things our guides told us, things we saw and did…. then when we had other questions, we looked them up on the Internet . The Amazon is the longest river in the world, just a bit longer than the Nile. The fresh water that flows into the Atlantic is the same amount as the next five biggest rivers in he world put together!

Last month, we went on a bus from Coca to Quito – from the Amazon rainforest to the high Andes mountains, where you see lots of snow topped volcanoes. We went up about 3000m in one day! 3km! We watch where we are going on a map on Mum’s iPhone because it uses satellites that show an arrow on the map where we are. And it shows information like latitude, longitude, and height above sea level too. While we were in Quito we went on a cable car up to 4000m where we all felt out of breath but looking over Quito was amazing. We took Flat Stanley and had a really great time that day.

We went on a trip to El Mitad del Mundo (the middle of the world) where the equator is. We have now crossed the Equator loads of times since our first journey four months ago when we crossed it in the aeroplane to get to Rio de Janeiro.Clark kids going to school

We went to a massive monument there which was where French explorers and scientists visited from 1736 to 1742 and marked it as an exact point on the equator – they actually got it a bit wrong but remember they didn’t have satellite, only looking at the stars so it must have been very difficult! They also went to the North Pole and then measured the distance from the Equator to the North Pole and divided it by 10 million and called that measurement a meter! So that is how the meter was invented.

We also went to a museum up the road that really is on the equator called Inti Nan and did cool experiments like seeing water go down the plughole straight on the equator but clockwise and anticlockwise on different sides We read that this maybe a trick but it definitely looked real to us!

Another time, in Brazil, we saw some really old maps stuck up in the toilets in an old hotel where we went for dinner! They were amazing! We took photos…one was a very very old map of when South America was being discovered and another was a very old map of the world that was being discovered 500 years ago. We could see that they hadn’t figured out all of Chile or the west side of North America and they hadn’t found Australia or New Zealand!

Actually, Ben and I drew world maps and South America maps and put places and our journey on them. It’s good to understand about where you are in the world when you’re travelling about! And we often look at where England is compared to where we are!

We did Spanish lessons in Quito for three weeks and for four hours a day. Ben and Lara and I had some lessons together and some just on our own with different teachers which was better. My Mum and Dad had their own lessons too.

Sometimes we did art or cooking and sometimes we all went together with out Spanish teachers on an outing. We went to the market, the supermarket, the natural history museum and the water museum.

Lara does phonics and counting most days. She likes to write the letters on Mum’s iPhone on some apps we downloaded and she’s getting better. She can now count to twenty and is starting to count to thirty! Ben and I can count to 100 in Spanish and Lara can count to 10! I’m trying to teach her to 20!


The Clark Family Adventure | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4