Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Discovery Museum in Acton

On July 13th, Rachel, Sarai, Marita and I ventured off to explore at the Discovery Museum in Acton. It is a really neat place to visit. There are two buildings. One is geared more towards the under 6/7 age group and the other building is for the over 6/7 group. You can go to both in one day, but my experience is to stick with the place that is best suited for your child's age.


Carmen was at Holy Cross for soccer camp and Tobin was working at Synqor.

I haven't visited this museum in years. It has been hard to satisfy them all with either building. Rachel is 7 and was given a free pass from a group that came to do science experiments in her school this spring. Sarai wondered if there would be anything at this museum that would intrest her. You'll see that all three girls really enjoyed themselves!
This is a picture of a thermal imaging wall. Everyone pushed their hands agains the black surface and a hand print was left. The cooler areas are blue and the redder areas are warmest. I had very cool hands (I was cold in the museum). The kids had much warmer hands!

Marita and Rachel spent a good amount of time here. There are two large magnetic walls. Each piece hanging from the wall can be moved because they are also held on by magnets. The goal is to create some kind of tunnel path for wooden balls to travel through. We tried several kinds of pieces, discovered how to make the balls roll upwards and that pieces move with each ball roll. Therefore, your path is never the same and the balls will not react the same way twice!


While Marita and Rachel played with the pieces to make a path, Sarai played with magnets of a different kind. Here there were two different shaped magnets and paperclips. As you moved the magnet under the paper clips you could create different shapes. She experimented with how far you could move the magnet and still attract the clips and other ways to make shapes and patterns with magnets and clips.



She then discovered a huge magnet that had come from a boat. Here we played with the distances you could hold metal washers and have the magnet pull your hand and washers back into the magnet field. This picture shows how she is placing each washer so that it creates teeth inside of a mouth. She "thinks" in art form at all times.


Rachel was able to experiment with a hand drill. We walked into the "creative" area. Here they had wood you could cut, nail, screw, drill and if you wished then decorate with various materials. The wood was hard to work with so the girls went right to creating.
Rachel recreated a rose with loose, silk rose petals.
Sarai created a self portrait. Sarai spent the longest time here (at least 45 minutes) working on her piece! She used fabric, yarn, stickers, paper, wrapping paper (this is how she found the cats!). She said that many other people would just watch her while she created!
Marita and I played with materials. I made a rainbow fish.

Rachel is playing with a funnel that she's filled with sand and can move around to create a sand spiro graph. They had a large table that was used to make spiro graph art. Rachel moved the table and created her own large spirograph art work.


Here Marita and Rachel are trying to use hair dryers to make ping-pong baskets. Marita was great at this! Rachel was determined to succeed. It took many tries, but she did it!


Mirrors are always fun. Here Sarai is standing on a box (not sceen) and with reflection is able to create a whole image. A whole crazy image. It was great fun! Dancy's notice the '91 OM shirt she's wearing?!

This part of the museum has three floors to it. We spent over 3 hours playing in it. The girls enjoyed all of the different experiments to play with. My pictures can only capture a small portion of what was there. I hope we return soon.

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