The Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Now that I've bombarded my blog with back-to-back food posts... how about some pictures of the actual people in my family and not just what's going into our bellies. :) Mmm-kay?

We had a fun weekend visiting a couple places we'd never been before.

On Saturday morning, after breakfast, we loaded up in the car (with a huge bag of library books for entertainment) and drove two hours to Cleveland to visit the Museum of Natural History. I'm pleased to tell you we did not use the DVD player at all for the drive there or back. :) Just books and chatting and looking out the window. Neither kids slept on the drive and we arrived at the museum around noon after stopping briefly to eat lunch. I find it so much easier to just pack food for the kids in times like this. We had a cooler filled with cut up fruit, raw veggies, cheese sticks, yogurt, whole wheat pancakes, pb&j sandwiches, pretzels, water bottles and bananas. For lunch this day, Sophie ate her favorite cottage cheese and squash combo while Will had a snack mix of raisins, peanuts, dry cereal and pretzels.

Here we are! At the museum!

My main reason for choosing a natural history museum, was (of course) to check out a prehistoric life exhibit. Will is in love with all things dinosaur these days, so I knew it would be right up his alley.

Daddy's so tough. ;)

While Craig got our tickets at check-in, the kids and I checked out the Foucault Pendulum in the lobby. Leon Foucault was a 19th century French physicist who invented this type of pendulum as a way of demonstrating the motion of the Earth's rotation. I'm sure the kids didn't care about the history of this, but it was cool to learn that the ground we were standing on was moving enough in 24 hours to knock down all the Domino chips and dinosaur figurines they had set up in a circle, while the motion of the pendulum was actually constant.

This was just part of the main lobby too.

The museum had a Little Builders hands-on area set up in the gallery right off of the lobby for kids to explore concepts of construction, motion and simple machines.

Sophie's very favorite spot that she continued to come back to was the conveyor belt. There was a cart of wood blocks at the front and back of the belt. She could place a block at one end and turn the wheel to make the block move down the belt and drop into the other cart. She loved this!

Will's favorite activity was definitely the crane where he could raise and lower the hook to lift those large Lego-looking blocks and then rotate the position of the crane to set them down somewhere else.

Hard Hat Hattie :) (What childhood book/game is that from? Case, do you know?)

Next stop in the museum was the Solar System.

Goofy picture of me... but check out Sophie's silly self looking through the 3D glasses at some pictures on the wall. LOL

When I was four years old and we'd just moved into a new house, my bedroom used to be a boys' room from the previous owners and there was an entire wall that was a picture of the Earth. I don't know if it was wallpaper or paint? But my dad always used to point out where our little town of Genoa was (approximately) on the U.S. map and Casey and I thought that was so cool.

Will and I have been reading a non-fiction book about dinosaurs by Mary Pope Osborne (author of the Magic Tree House books) that talks about how all the continents used to be one "supercontinent" back in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras before they separated into their current configuration. Will didn't remember the name for this "supercontinent" (Pangaea) but we talked about it again here. (Trivia-whiz Craig remembered even though he hasn't been reading with us! I confess, I had forgotten this from my school days.)

A lot of displays on various "ages", rocks, gems, minerals, etc. Will liked the volcanic exhibit.

Standing on the center of a giant, preserved tree trunk. Craig was reminding him that you can count the rings to determine the age of the tree.

Moving on to the animal exhibit. We watched part of a live animal demonstration with an owl and a skunk. :)

Various animal habitat displays.

The evolution of homo sapiens...

And finally! The prehistoric life exhibit!

There were huge triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex replicas in the center with lots of other prehistoric creature displays surrounding them. Will recognized many of the Ice Age movie characters in one section, but I didn't get a picture of those.

Our feigned freight. :)

Gotta' love my Sophie-girl. She's always so gosh-darn happy. :)

A walking path outside took us through several live, Ohio, animal exhibits.

One of our final stops was to the Smead Discovery Center (a hands-on learning room) on the museum's lower level. They had tons of educational displays set up that read "Please Touch". Tables and chairs and work centers let the kids explore all kinds of natural science topics.

Will made a bee-line for the dinosaur figurines on a central table with a play mat. I loved the play mat! I'm going to look for one of those to set on top of his train table (which can be used as a simple activity table too). They seem like they would really enhance imaginative play.

Puzzles

This was cool. They had a keyboard set up where each key made a different bird call and lit up a picture of that bird on the screen above. Sophie and I played this for awhile.

Craig and I about died laughing when we saw this expression that we caught on camera. This girl is so funny with her animated expressions. Will had all sorts of animated expressions as a baby, while Sophie did not. But now they have certainly flip flopped in that regard.

I showed Sophie how to use a magnifying glass and then she wouldn't put it down. She walked around looking at everything under the magnifying glass. :)

LOL :)

Sophie playing in the "Fossil Dig".

Checking out a "Leopard Gecko"... with the magnifying glass. :) There was a tarantula in the next tank! Eek!

Here's a topic I'd like to learn more about:

And finally, before leaving, we peaked into the Shafran Planetarium. There's an extra fee for the majority of this, but we were able to walk through the tunnel with fiber-optic "stars" flashing all around (my camera didn't capture them), and then see a few small exhibits.

The planetarium offers daily live shows and programs for guests. We didn't stay for one, but we did see a cool exhibit that allowed us to push buttons for each month of the year to see the configuration of stars at different times of the year above us on a big domed "sky".

Here's a view of the outside of the planetarium.

We left the museum around 2 or 3 p.m. (?) and the kids immediately crashed in the car as we made our way to our hotel. Craig and I drove around a little while to scope out the area and let the kids sleep a little bit.