Children’s Discovery Museum

What an eventful day! First we had to take Jonathon to work today (just like every Friday) so we could have the car for our Friday Fun Day’s – today we were going to the Children’s Discovery Museum with our friends the Smith’s. We get home and we find THIS…

I just about killed me a dog! Then I realized he was stuck and couldn’t figure out how to get down – that made me laugh. I’m still pretty mad at him, but I know I will laugh about this one day!

We headed out with the Smith’s and had a blast. The first thing we did was climb “The Tower”. Man who ever designed that, needs to be shot… or given a job designing gyms! My legs got a massive workout climbing the stairs, in which each step HAD to be at least 15 inches high!

They had this drum that shot air out – Ethen tried to figure it out on his own but realized it worked best if someone stabilized it while he pulled the plunger back!

One level was nothing but music and had a giant guitar, drums, chimes, xylophone and maracas! It was fun making music with the kids. I bet the person working that level had bleeding ears by the end of the day though!

Now that we are out of the tower of “Death to all Quadriceps” we moved onto the rest of the museum. They recently added a new exhibit for thinkers – a mystery room where clues were given and problems needed solving. It was a bit out of the scope of our young learners so we quickly moved on. The ONE game they enjoyed, a spelling game, other kids would interrupt the game so it wasn’t much fun after all! There was a mat with a bunch of random letters, you had to spell a word all the way to the end. If you stepped wrong it would misspell the word. The tiles were very sensitive and unsupervised kiddos kept running onto it, thus messing up our game! Oh well, onto the next one!

Next we hit up the “Invention Room” and this is where Ethen shined! They had several building stations. One was to build and test a racecar from Legos. They had ramps to test them on, if your car made it to the end, it was a good one. If not, rebuild until it does! Ethen set straight to work building his racecar and it made it all the way on the first try! WAY TO GO!!!

Ethen then started helping our friend, Ben, build his racecar!

This next table was the BEST one and by far Ethen’s crowning achievement! The task was to build a bridge from one ramp to the other that would allow a ping pong ball to roll completely through. It was tough and to be honest I had to step back and (which was the hardest part for me I think) let Ethen figure it out. It took him a few tries, but with encouragement and a few subtle hints he finally got it!

 

Watch as we test out Ethen’s bridge! For a brief moment you can see the pure satisfaction on his face! He was very proud of himself (and so was I) that he had done it all on his own! So glad I didn’t ruin that for him by trying to do it for him!

Our last station was the water station, for obvious reason! These kids had so much fun playing in the water. Building dams and learning about the power that water has. There was one part where you could close doors to let the water build and then open them again to let the water through. Ethen and I did a test to see if it would be easy or hard to open the doors with the water full. We tested the water low and he found the doors were fairly easy to open. We then closed them and allowed the water to fill. Then we tried to open them again and he discovered that they were definitely harder to open! He learned that water has weight and it’s force can make it hard to move objects! What a discovery!'

There was so much to see and do, we didn’t get to it all. Thankfully it’s not a one time thing. I’m sure we’ll be back for more learning very soon!!