Clark Planetarium

Today we had the opportunity to join some other homeschoolers at the local planetarium. The kids had never been so I thought that it would be pretty cool. Turns out...it was pretty cool! We did not head out of the house until a quarter to noon though, so during the morning we had language arts. The kids both had spelling tests (they passed), Princess did some vocabulary work and exercises with identifying pronouns, and Spike read The Ugly Duckling from his reading book and answered questions to make sure he understood. He was rather peeved with that since he assured me he had already read the story in another book, and yet I made him do it again. Feel free to imagine my evil mom laugh now.

After language arts, we ate some lunch and packed up to go. But I could not just let the kids sit and vegetate during the 40 minute drive, could I? Of course not! They got math work to do while I drove us there. Amazingly, they did not seem to mind. After all, they were really looking forward to the field trip. So, today I explained to Princess how to do multiplication of a three digit number by a two digit number during the car ride. How productive I feel.


So now we were at the truly fun part of our day. We arrived at the planetarium and awaited the rest of the homeschoolers. The kids really liked the big globe thing at the entrance. It is actually a big white ball in which images are projected onto from three sides. Spike liked when it showed all the earthquakes happening around the globe during one day. There are more than you would think. And yes, in this picture Spike is pulling weird eyes at me. The kid won't look normal for a picture if he can help it.


After I explained to them what the pendulum was demonstrating (that is, that the pendulum swings the same, but the earth is rotating, so the circle of planks gets knocked down slowly), they seemed to find it much more interesting. Here is a whole crowd of homeschooled munckins patiently waiting for the event of the next little block to be knocked down.


Sprout had little to no interest in the pendulum. She, instead, liked this wheel that could be turned. It was spinning a moon around a model earth, but I am pretty sure she could not see that since it was pretty high up. So, for no point apparently, she just kept turning, and turning, and turning and had a wonderful time doing so.

Although they have done something similar to this before, both the big kids spent a while turning a wheel to see how hard it was to get different types of light bulbs to light up, therefore seeing how much energy is used for each type. They found out they could make the LED and fluorescent lights together glow easier than just the regular one alone.


At this point we all went and watched a movie in the dome theater. The big kids really liked it, and Sprout thought that it was okay.

After the movie we watched the audio-kinetic sculpture, which has a bunch of balls that go through a maze of drops and spins and roller coaster type stuff, sometimes hitting chimes along the way. The whole sculpture is about two stories tall and is a lot of fun to watch. There are also larger balls rolling around on tracks on the ceiling.

The kids took turns standing on a scale that tells you how much you weight on other planets and stars. Spike would weigh in at a whopping 12,620 billion pounds on a neutron star, while Sprout would be a meager 3 pounds on the moon.


And then what else was there? Oh yeah, the kids visited the moon...


and Mars. Princess and Spike had a hard time breathing, and even starting collapsing, but Sprout apparently is an alien who survive perfectly in that atmosphere and could not figure out why they could not.