Despite the trek to Harlow, the children all very much enjoy the half-termly sessions at Science Alive, including J who begs to come along whenever he can and claims he would happily miss school for them. Hmmm.
On Tuesday 16th July the topic was The Body. Friends had been on the Monday and said it was good so although we were sad to have missed them we were looking forward to it, and it didn’t disappoint. The only issue we had was that the Tuesdays seem to attract slightly younger children, which meant J and K were both older than anyone else there (on the Monday they wouldn’t have been) but fortunately there are now enough children attending that the groups get split by age for activities so it wasn’t as much of a problem as it might have been if the leaders had been trying to hold together the full age range at once.
They started with a presentation on bodily solids, liquids and gases, in which K, L and A all got to help at various points. This made them very happy 🙂 Time for a bit of exploring (and some new exhibits to play with – more maths than last time I was there) and then A went off to her first workshop, making snot/slime while J, K, 6 and L extracted their own DNA and put it into little tiny bottles to hang on necklaces. The second workshop was DNA bracelets for the older ones (making a DNA-type code from their names and translating it into beads on a bracelet) and cardboard skeleton assembly for the younger, while in the third session A drew her organs onto a t-shirt while the older ones made a working model of a lung in a rib cage, using plastic bottles and balloons (J said he’d done that at school already so went off to look at more exhibits; he doesn’t get to go as often as the others so I guess that’s fair enough) and an articulated hand using drinking straws and string – very cool.
I left them to it for some of the time and walked over to investigate the shopping centre nearby and to find out about the big Water Gardens sign we see from the roundabout – on such a hot day it sounded hopeful 😉 Sadly, it proved to be just another shopping centre – disappointing 🙁
Science done for the day, we all went swimming. A was worried as she couldn’t put her feet on the bottom in the main pool and the small pool was busy with lessons, but she gained confidence as we went along. Next time I must remember to put her floatjacket in the car so that she has that as an option too.
C said about the water gardens as the water spout feature didn’t register as something we’d noticed previously. I suspected it was just a name for a shopping centre.