24th March, 2007
Day at the Museum
Friday was our big field trip to the Clay Center for Arts and Sciences in the big ol’ capitol city of Charleston. It’s just an hour drive from us, but as my father found out, an hour is a looooong time when you are in the car with an inquisitive 9yo. What started as a conversation about the word “Kanawha”, as in the county, river, road, etc., turned into a discussion of Axis and Allied forces during WWII, to a comparison of the Holocaust and Native American displacement, to the war in Iraq and why can’t we just leave? Yeah. I am not sure how Papaw felt about encouraging critical thinking after that. 
The main attraction was the planetarium show on Mars and the Night Sky. We haven’t done much on the planets themselves because Joe was really into the constellations and stars. Learning about all the different satellites and probes we have sent was fascinating. They even gave us a websiteto see the images that the current rovers are taking right now! Coool! The constellation part was mainly review for Joe, but it was awesome to see what it would look like without all the streetlights. If anybody wants to study the stars and solar system I highly recommend A Kid’s Guide to the Night Sky . It has great projects and the explanations are fun to read. It is well-organized and crammed with great (but thankfully easy)projects and stories.
After the show we hit the Earth City exhibit where we learned how dams, sandstorms, geysers, and formations work. It showed how WV developed as a land formation from pre-historic times. They also had a kids health exhibit where you could test your reaction time and look at weird X-rays and guess what you were looking at ( i.e. broken leg). The best was an arrow that a hunter had accidentally shot into his own patella. EEEWWW!
After lunch we went upstairs to the art exhibit. They had a cool huge screen TV show called Art at your Fingertips. You could play with and learn about the portraits and paintings interactively. There aren’t many places you can play bouncy ball with the Portrait of Henry Gibbs. They were featuring an artist who created these wonderfully colorful sculptures using the Fibonacci sequence. Then we went to the Gizmo Factory which was a huge room full of physical science exhibits. It was like one big playroom. They covered sound, waves, light, gravity computers, magnetism, weather, etc.,etc. After That we watched a movie in the planetarium called Africa: The Serengetti. It was awesome to watch but let me warn you: it is not pleasant to watch lions mate on the big panoramic screen. I’m just sayin…
All in all we had a great day. Joe, who is such a serious boy, felt like a kid in a candy store for a day. He smiled and laughed and forgot to be brooding and introspective. Not that those are bad qualities. It’s just nice to have a little levity with your learnin’.
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