Highlands Elementary School

Concord, California

October 10, 2000: Tunia arrived safe and sound. Everybody gets a chance to be in charge of Tunia. Tunia is getting along with our guinea pig, Molly. We like her very much. Tunia is going to Mt. Diablo with us on our field trip on Friday. We are sending you some pictures of Tunia in our classroom.

Tunia looks happy to meet Room 10's guinea pig, Molly.

Tunia takes some time to look at different kinds of seeds.

Tunia seems comfortable sitting on a fossil while surrounded by books.

October 13, 2000: Room 10 traveled to the top of Mt. Diablo, which is almost in our school's "backyard." Mt. Diablo is 3,849 feet high. It is the tallest mountain in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it is not a really tall mountain compared to all of the mountains in the world. There is one very special thing about Mt. Diablo, though. It has lots of flat land around it. When you are standing on the top of Mt. Diablo, you can see more land than anywhere else in the whole world, except from the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro! We think that is really cool. On Mt. Diablo, we saw madrone trees. They have a dark red shiny bark. We also saw California buckeye trees, poison oak, rattlesnake grass, and lots of oak trees. The Native Americans used to go to Mt. Diablo to gather acorns from the oak trees to pound and cook for food. In the spring you can see lots of wildflowers on Mt. Diablo. There are California poppies all over the place. We saw a coyote, a tarantula, some red ants, and some lizards on our trip. There are many other animals that live on Mt. Diablo. We saw some rocks with shell fossils in them because Mt. Diablo was once under the ocean and sediments and shells fell to the bottom of the ocean and turned into sedimentary rock.We took pictures from the top of Mt. Diablo. It was a little bit hazy, but you still could see a long, long way.

This view from Mt. Diablo shows what is to its north.

Look at the view of a pumpkin patch from the top of Mt. Diablo.

Our school, Highlands Elementary in Concord, California has about 780 students in grades Kindergarten through fifth. Tunia got to see what a suburban school looks like. In California, all of the classrooms open out to the outside. We do not have halls to walk down. Our school is a one-story building. We have a big park next to our school, which gives us lots of grass to play on. It only rained two days while Tunia was visiting us.

We took a picture of Tunia in front of a house near our school. Concord is a city of about 116,000 people and we live at the edge of the suburban area around the downtown. The houses in our neighborhood are one-story ranch houses. We have some other areas that have condominiums and apartments.

Tunia is near the garden next to a California poppy plant that blooms in the spring.

Tunia is under a liquid amber tree at school. In Concord, we get a few trees with "color".

October 25, 2000: Tunia left Concord today on her way across the Pacific Ocean. We hope she doesn't get seasick. We will miss her. She had a very good time while she was visiting us. We think she learned a lot about sunny California! We hope she can remember some of it.

Find information about California at 50states.com.

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