Sunday, Week six

So where do you take a jet-lagged travel-weary Senior Vacationeer?

Why to an active science museum, of course!

Where brother and sister Vacationeer found lots to explore and encounter.

Eventually the Daddy Vacationeer was drawn into the activity.

Once you get started on a project it's hard to stop....

the constructions could have gone on all day!

But more adventure called....

Touching

Today at Wonderlab we talked about our sense of touch.

Everyone wanted to pet the soft bunny.

Everyone touched the bristles of the brush and said "oww!"

(The brush was very jealous of the bunny.)

We mixed "Cloud Dough" with our hands.

Here's a recipe for those readers who have little hands in the house.

Take 3 parts flour

1 part oil

3/4 part water

Put in a big bowl.

Push it and stir it and swish it with your fingers.

Add more or less of each ingredient to make a smooth, silky dough.

This dough is great for pretend cooking. Or you can roll it into snakes. You can make balls and then flatten them with your fist. Knead it and push it up between your knuckles.

It is also therapeutic for adults who might need to work out some tension.

And the nicest thing about Cloud Dough is that it leaves your hands feeling soft.

Tasting

Isn't this a good time of year to do a program on the sense of taste? My little group at Wonderlab was really into the experience.
We started with salt and sugar - it took some doing to get them to just lick their fingers and take a few crystals to taste. The poor little guy who drank his salt straight down ended up in tears.
So after sweet and salty, we went on to sweet and sour:

A slice of tangerine and a tiny bit of lemon.
As I was explaining that the lemon was sour and that they might just want to lick it to get the flavor - they gobbled up both slices. Sour? They didn't notice.

We ended with a tasty treat from The Green Bean, a new coffee shop just down the street from Wonderlab. One side is chocolate chip and the other is carrot - and neither are sour or salty!

Another kind of museum

There is a lot of wonder in the local kid's science museum.Our second trip was as much fun as the first. We spent hours suspended two stories above the first floor

exploring and looking at things in our own way.
The grapevine climber is our favorite thing.
We spent a lot of time with bubbles, too.With wet hands you can even put your fist right through a bubble.
The dinosaur looks threatening but he is really just telling how tall Brother Vacationeer is.

Outside in the garden, we make real Rock Music. Like with real rocks.

The sun shines

The sun is shining, things are drying out. Everywhere people are returning to soggy carpet and dripping furniture. The paper has pictures of the damage revealed as the flood waters go down. A sink-hole opened up on the football field. A bridge is still out at the end of our road.

We are fine. Water is now something for kids to play in at Wonderlab - this fellow is finding out about rocks by washing them during my Wednesday program. Downstream from us, it's a different story.

Hearts for Valentine's Day

Stuffee makes a reappearance for my Wonderlab theme of hearts. Behind the appliqued heart on his chest is a plastic heart that really throbs (it is made to soothe babies). It can be passed around so each child can feel it beat and hear it thump. They have a little more trouble feeling their own heart - their hands are on their tummies. We try feeling pulses. Do they feel anything? Maybe... We jump up and down for a count of 60. Are our hearts beating faster? They are unsure. They can jump up and down all day without feeling it. "Look here," says the panting leader, "you can feel my pulse - it's going really fast."
As we go on I realize that not only is my old bony wrist an easy place to feel the pulse but they can easily see the blue veins on the top of my hand - and wiggle them around. I'm as good a demonstration as Stuffee. One of the unsung advantages of age.

Guts

If you need to give a hands on demonstration of the digestive system, who you gonna call?

Stuffee, that's who. It took four preschoolers to haul out his intestines and drag them across the floor.

They all found digestion a fascinating topic for Discovery Time - spit! burps! poop! -

and they got to eat crackers and clementines as part of the demonstration.

On the evaluation forms afterwards I read that the moms thought that "manners" would be a good topic.

And the head bone's connected to...

This was my week for dinosaurs, and for the old bones that Mimi gave me long ago. They've been hiding in a box in the basement since I retired, but I always knew they'd see the light of day again. So when M.D. asked me to do "something interesting" for the 4th grades on the day I subbed for her, I thought about those dry bones...and metacognition. The fourth graders now think that metacognition is the name of a really cool dinosaur. My idea was to have them think about what they were thinking and guessing and shouting out as we uncovered one remnant of a skeleton and then another. Along the way, I also pointed out how people's thoughts about dinosaurs have changed. I even had a book from 1960 with terribly outdated information (all of which was sadly still firmly stuck in MY head, since that's about the time I was learning about prehistoric life. I'm sorry to note that Brontosaurus, the thunder lizard, is no more.)
Then I took the dinosaur books and bones to Wonderlab for the Preschool Discovery time. The preschoolers were wildly enthusiastic and wanted to get their hands on everything. With them, I was going for vocabulary - skeleton, fossil, plant-eater - and the idea that these giant creatures are not around any more. Don't be scared of them! Not even the big model of a meat-eating monster that stands right outside the lab door and looks as if he's going to gobble you up.
To complete my week of dinosaur immersion, I took the set-up to my early childhood class to talk about setting up environments for thematic units. (My students were not quite sure what to make of this. )

In every situation and with every class, the old skeleton elicits questions and guesses and total fascination. Someone always asks, "Are those bones real?" I say, they are real bones. I don't say they are real dinosaur bones. There's always a smart kid who "knows" what it is (A duckbill! That has to be a duckbill!)

But I never reveal the animal's identity.

WonderGarden

One of the activities that I suspended this past school year was "Discovery Time" at Wonderlab, in which preschoolers explore a science theme with books, stories and some special activities. Now I've resumed this Wednesday morning activity. It was raining for my first two July Discovery Times, so we met inside in the lab. This week, Wednesday's weather was perfect - sunny but not too hot - and the Wondergarden made the perfect setting for our meeting.
I shared some simple facts about a crustacean common in Indiana, then equipped each budding scientist with a magnifying glass. "Who wants to hold one for a closer look?" I asked. Every little hand popped out. Mothers grimaced. I spilled the multi-legged creatures onto plump palms one by one. It took a while but finally all were supplied with a subject to oberve. Then I looked around. There in a circle behind me four children crouched, noses to the ground and rear ends in the air, eyes pressed to their magnifying glasses, while frantic pillbugs disappeared into the cracks between the stones.