Dear Wilmington Friends,

Hello! I just finished my Spring Break here in Belize. Here are some of the things I did.

I visited a chocolate factory and learned how to make chocolate. Chocolate comes from a plant; this is what it looks like in the beginning...

You take out the beans inside and roast them. Then they look like this...

Can you believe that's chocolate?!

I went to the zoo! I saw all the animals we learned about in class. Can you tell what these are?

The tapir! I fed some leaves to a baby tapir...

This one is hard to tell. It's the howler monkey. 

Behind me is the scarlet macaw. Isn't it beautiful?

I saw other animals too. This is a black jaguar...

Here is a spotted jaguar...

Jaguars are really big cats. Here is another big cat called a puma...

The national bird in Belize is the keel-billed toucan. Look how colorful it is...

He was a very friendly little guy...

I found another bird that was colorful...

I loved seeing the animals at the Belize Zoo. After I went to the zoo, I visited a big cave called the ATM Cave. It was very dark; we had to wear flashlights on our heads so we could see. Here's a picture from another cave I went to...

Which picture is the inside of the cave, and which picture is the outside of the cave?

Next, I saw some Mayan ruins in Caracol. Mayans were people who lived a long, long time ago. They built all their houses out of rocks. We can still see their houses today...

No one lives there now, so we can look at them and even climb all the way to the top. Can you tell where I am?...

From the top, the Mayan ruins look beautiful.

Today I took a bus to a country next to Belize called Guatemala. Here I zip lined in the rain forest.

Zip lining is when you hook onto a big line called a cable and go zipping through the jungle! People do it for fun. I thought it was a blast.

Afterwards I ate lunch and shopped in a city called Flores. I had nachos for lunch and bought a gigantic water bottle...

Flores is an island, so we were surrounded by a lake...

While I was in Guatemala, I had three different kinds of dollars: money from the United States, money from Belize, and money from Guatemala...

Now I'm back in Belize. What did you guys do from Spring Break? (You can leave an answer in the comments!)

-Ms. Gibson