Thursday, November 24, 2011

Day 3: The Exploratorium

 Our good friends, Jolene and Robert Denham, grew up in the Bay Area and usually come to the Bay area to be with family for holidays.  They came up a little early for Thanksgiving to do some sightseeing with us.  Robert is a music professor at BIOLA and Jolene also homeschools her kids.  They live right down the street from us and are our closest friends here. They have Robby (6), David (5), Benjamin (3), and Kathleen (7 mos.).  It was really fun to be able to explore the Exploratorium with them!
 Everything here is hands-on and the kids had a blast.  Sky designed and built this butterfly.
 There were lots of pulleys and levers to experiment with.
 When you tap this drum, the plate under your feet vibrates.  The girls thought that was pretty cool.
 There was some cool steamy things that Lila really enjoyed.
 Brad LOVED this beach ball in the air thing.  He could have played here all day. 
 He also really enjoyed this peg board with which you can use other materials (funnels, wheels, etc.) to design your own marble track.  Then you can test your track with marbles and make necessary adjustments.  Brad was really into this!
 This was a spinning plate with sand and you could make your own designs and speed up or slow down the spinning.
 Lila and Robby built some marble tracks with these blocks.
 Brad liked this mechanism where you could speed up, slow down, or change direction of the rope on the pulley.
And Sky waited in line to have the chance to do this art project.  She shook the platform in a variety of ways until she was ready to set the marker loose on the paper.  Then the marker would make waves according to how the platform was shaking.  She got to choose her colors and keep her paper when she was done.  The Exploratorium was really fun and quite extensive.  I feel like we could go back tomorrow and spend the day doing things we didn't even have a chance to do.

1 comment:

Mom & Bill said...

Oh my goodness, what an awesome place!! Loved seeing pictures of the kids enjoying the various activities!! :-))