In At The Deep End

To tie in the film of the same name (nice free publicity) and in honour of the half term holiday, some local museums did a special afternoon / evening event for children. They dimmed the lights and invited the children to bring their torches, stayed open late and had some special activities.

Katy and the children had already done Parents and Tots, drama, a trip to some charity shops and the Sedgwick Museum before I joined them at the Arch. and Anth. museum which is one of my favourite places. Some of the staff recognised our children from the last open day (not sure if that’s a good or bad sign!). As well as shining your torch on a 30 foot grizzly bear totem pole etc. there was making puppets to use as shadow puppets - as ever the staff were great.

We tore ourselves away from there to get to the Zoology museum before it closed. Having had things explained by J+K’s friend S and his dad (who was most impressed by K’s Thunderbird 2 torch, and J’s torch with its red and green filters) we went hunting around the display cases looking for owl signs that would give us the next question to answer, e.g. Whose bedchamber did the Death’s Head Hawk Moth visit?* The lights were so dim that you really did need to shine your torch to read things, and it was great for things like the mother of pearl inside a shell, or the wings of a bird of paradise. Katy and L made a rather nice owl while we men were hunting (for clues).

By chucking out time we’d got all the clues, got the stickers (see Flickr) and were all tired and hungry (and it was passed bedtime for most people). Oh, and the car was a long way away. We wandered in the direction of the car but got side-tracked by Pizza Hut for some haute cuisine. Eventually, after much use of slings, shoulder carries and piggy backs, we got to the car, got home and packed the kids off to bed.

During the short journey home J read the human biology book (How Your Body Works) that he’d got from a charity shop earlier. It includes a fair amount on reproduction (which he read and started commenting on to the others :roll:), so the cat’s out of the bag on that front although we’re hoping we can limit it for now to just J.

* King George III’s. You might recognise the moth from Silence of the Lambs posters.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Home Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.