Explora!

I love that my kids like to play pretend. This morning they were playing "home church" taking turns preparing a lesson from a Bible verse and leading each other singing praise songs. Skylar even wrote his own song called "I don't need anything (but Your love)". So proud.

Then in the afternoon, Skylar opened up a store where he was selling miscellaneous stuff. He hired both Brynna and Spencer to do different jobs and made them name tags with their job titles on them. Sky's name tag denoted his name and his job title "Boss".

Quote of the day, Skylar to Spencer, his employee: If you're going to argue with me, do you know what I could do? I could fire you. Do you see this right here? (points to his name tag)
I cracked up which caused him to laugh too, but when he said it, he was dead serious.

"Boss"

Once we had completed our schoolwork for the day, somewhere around 3 pm, we decided we would head into town to check out Explora Children's Museum. It was pretty cool, definitely worth the trip. There were lots of interactive displays in a variety of scientific areas. (light, air, water, sound, electricity, bubbles) I was a little apprehensive when we first got there because there was a LARGE school group that was near the front exhibits when we first walked in, but they must've been finishing up or doing group activities in classrooms or something because we never really saw them after that.

Stare into my kaleidoscope

Bryn, Spence, and Sky had a blast flying a model airplane in a wind tunnel with controls that I think were pretty realistic, two pedals on the floor and two joysticks.

Experimenting with air currents, Bernoulli principle

Bryn's simple copter weighted with paper clips
caught the updraft well, flew really high and stayed up there.

They experimented with differently designed wind-powered cars and raced them.

Sky's strategy was to have as many sails as possible. When another
car was faster, he was sure that it had gotten a head start.

We got to see some cool creatures.

Ocho, the Chilean Rose Tarantula

Brynna and a very active bull snake

A bearded dragon

Axolotl - weird prehistoric-looking salamander thingy

The kids had fun trying to create giant bubbles.

They created a "cage" for wild animals. ;o)

They played a lot with water flow on a water table and here was a closed system where you control the flow of water, valves, and compressed air that can be added. 

Upstairs in the area of "sound", Bryn and Spence put on headphones and then they chose buttons that would delay the sound in your ears and some that would delay and distort it by slowing it down. You were supposed to say something that would normally be easy, like the alphabet. Skylar and I had moved on to another display, but we heard Bryn and Spence laughing pretty hard from a couple exhibits away.

We probably had a good two hours at the museum and we really didn't get to do everything we wanted as it was closing time. I think if we'd had three hours it would have been about right for us, but we really enjoyed Albuquerque's Children's Museum. Turns out it is right across the street from the natural history museum which also looked like fun and is on our reciprocal museum list so we may hit that one too before the week is out.