Fun with the Andersons

The girls and I spent the morning and early afternoon yesterday visiting the Science Museum of Minnesota with our friends from down the street: Kelly and her girls, Isabelle and Hope. The Museum has "Preschool Playdate" days where they have specific activities geared toward the younger crowd.




We walked through one floor and learned about the region around us. The kids could see if they weighed as much as certain fish found in the area. There was a tug boat that you could climb in and "drive" and a telescope to look out at the landscape. We made our way down a couple floors where they had the preschool activities. Ella was especially enamored with these. They had vertical wind tunnels set up and various materials. You could try putting the materials in and see if they blew up or didn't. You could make a contraption and try to put it in and see what happened. Ella spent a half hour or more at this one station. She built this whole thing out of a bunch of materials and it didn't fly. So she kept trying to change it and figure out how to make it fly. Eventually, we removed one thing at a time until she got it to fly up high.


Ella making her contraption with the museum educator and then testing it out in the wind tunnel.

They also had really a really neat art activity that I'll share in a separate post. Ella was really into this as well. While Ella was doing the activities forever the other kids checked out the weather area. Hope was particularly interested in one display where you could make a tornado out of mist coming up from the floor. And Lily really like the sound/music area where you rub a bow on a cello and play a keyboard and see what the sound waves looked like. Isabelle said she liked everything! :-)


Left: Hope at the Tornado machine; Right: Everyone at the Animation exhibit.

We also visited their Animation exhibit where there was a foley studio set up. They had a cartoon playing on a screen and materials to make specific sound effects. You went through and made all the sounds while it recorded. Then it played back what your sounds were with the cartoon. The girls really seemed to like that. They had an area where you could trace the outside of a character on paper and then color it in. So, as I'm sure you can guess, Ella enjoyed this activity.

Ella was really interested in everything. She wanted to learn about different things. There was one area about light and color. She was very into that. And they had a couple microscopes you could look in and see different bugs, which she also enjoyed. I loved the Science Museum when I was little so it was fun to see her enjoy the experience so much.

We all had a ton of fun on our outing with the Andersons! I hope we can do something like that with them again soon.