Last Tuesday, 15 AP Biology students traveled to the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita with teacher Pat Lamb to finish off their zoology unit.

“We got a special tour by a friend of [Lamb’s] and we got to feed several of the animals and also hold several animals that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do and then later on we filled out a worksheet,” junior Mackenzie Gwinner said. “We chose a reptile, a bird, an amphibian and a mammal and we wrote about its habitat and special adaptations about it.”

The AP Biology class has gone on several field trips this year to learn about other units. Students have gone to Konza Prairie for the ecology unit as well as the Flint Hills Discovery Center and the Sternberg Museum in Hays.

“We’ve been doing a zoology unit and learning about animals so this just kind of tied everything we’ve been learning together,” Gwinner said.

The experience that the students got from the trip connected the classroom learning to the real world and gave the students an opportunity to learn hands-on with the animals.

“It was really fun, we got to learn a lot. Academic-wise, we got to focus on the different adaptations of phylums and classes,” senior Lisa Zhu said.

The field trip provided the students with a few unique experiences including holding snakes and feeding rare animals.

“[My favorite part was] feeding the Okapi — it’s really rare,” junior Maddie Taylor said. “They’re going extinct so it’s something once in your lifetime you can do.”