Day at the Museum
Day at the Museum
Originally uploaded by aswitzer.
It’s the sequel to the recent Ben Stiller movie - “Night at the Museum“!
Okay, not really… but go see the movie - it’s a surprisingly entertaining movie.
Back to the subject at hand -Tobey had no daycare this past Monday, thanks to President’s Day, so I took a vacation day and took Tobey to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Tobey had not yet been to the museum, but I knew with his recent love of anything about Space, and having recently enjoyed the Boulder Planetarium with Grammy and Gramps, that we would have a great time. We left the house at around 9:00 to arrive close to the opening of the museum. That worked out great, as with many Denver area schools on vacation for the day, the museum got more and more crowded the entire time we were there.
We headed straight to the Space Odyssey Exhibit, and spent our first hour there. Because it wasn’t too crowded yet, we had great attention from the Museum volunteers at several of the stations that we went to. We learned about sun dials, sandstorms and volcanoes on Mars, different spectrums of light, and the different orbital alignments of the planets in our solar system. I was amazed at Tobey’s attention span with each of the volunteers we interacted with, and he even asked several questions at each station. We even got to discuss the fact that Pluto didn’t just “blow up” with the man at the last station. 
I then took Tobey to a movie in the planetarium, entitled - “A Cosmic Journey“. This was actually one of the few low points of the day. Once the initial excitement wore off with how the movie shows on the entire dome of the planetarium, the movie was quite dissapointing. The movie had lots of little kids in it, but it was presented in such a dry manner that nearly all of them lost interest in it just a few minutes into it. The movie was only 20 minutes, but seemed longer since myself and most other parents were trying to keep our kids in their seats and quiet for the few people that were still paying attention. If Tobey and I go back anytime soon, we’ll try the newer showing of “Cosmic Collisions” which looked to be much more exciting, just from the preview we had of it.
After we had finished the Space Odyssey exhibit, we went on to the “Discovery Zone“, which was specifically targeted at kids. They had lots of great interactive stations here, with some highlights being: a bubble making area, a plastic human body where you could take out organs like a puzzle and then put them back again, and Tobey’s favorite - a fossil dig site. We spent at least 20-30 minutes there alone, and even came back again after exploring other parts of the museum.
The Prehistoric Journey exhibit did little for Tobey, but he may enjoy that section when he gets a little older. I was surprised though when we took a quick walk thru “Gems and Minerals” and he really took a shine to it. (ha, ha) He enjoyed how they made parts of it feel like a mining cave, and he really enjoyed showing people one section that had a special black-light to show the special luminescent qualities of some minerals.
This was as much of an adventure for me as it was for Tobey. I always enjoy experiencing things thru his point of view, but since I hadn’t been to the Museum myself in at least 20 years, I really enjoyed walking thru it for myself. I was happy to see that what some might consider a stuffy environment really could hold the extremely short attention span of an active three year old. To me though, it’s all in how you present it to the young mind. If you work at it, and add in a dash of creativity, you can make excitement and adventure out of nearly anything.
If you haven’t already seen it, check out the Flickr photoset from the day. Thanks for all of your comments on the photos there already!
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:51 am
Great Blog Alan! I am sure it will be a memorable day for Tobey with all the exciting things that he was able to do and see.
Gramps