Field Trip Friday: Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium

I remembered at 12:30 AM that I needed to get up with the Bigger Littles and be out of the house in just seven hours for a nearly two hour drive for our field trip to the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium in St. Johnsbury!  OOPS!

I was really looking forward to this trip.  We had finished up Apologia's Astronomy book in January and I wanted to be able to reinforce some of what was learned while it was still relatively fresh.

We actually didn't stay very long.  Micah had a role in a mystery dinner theater that night, and we had to get our Wild West on!

The main floor was mostly wide open and filled with various taxidermy projects and habitats found in Vermont.  This was pretty interesting, but the most incredible part was seeing all those homeschooled children standing in a *line!*  Xav was such a cute little goofball in his hat.

 

Upstairs, were displays of toys, bugs, and many different societies in places and times.

In the planetarium, we saw a really neat presentation.  The boys handled it well.  I wasn't sure how Mal would do, but he enjoyed it even though it was a bit long on the less interesting parts.  For instance, we really liked the part that showed the sky for 24 hours and the changing constellations. Honestly though, the part about the zodiac was so boring.  I also could have done without the story of a drunk teenager calling the educator at home in the middle of the night to report UFOs.  I would have loved if they had focused more on visiting planets than seeing that.  We "traveled" to one of the gas giants and learned a lot about that.  After five months, my brain is fuzzy about exactly which planet we got to see in depth.  I guess I should write these Field Trip posts in a more timely manner. Outside the planetarium, the boys got weighed on a special scale that showed what they weighed on Earth, Venus, Mars, and the moon.

This light up sphere thingy was very cool.  The OmniGlobe displayed all kinds of information about the solar system, Earth, our moon.  Basically, it can display as any sphere.  We were able to look at the weather on Earth and other planets, compare sizes of planets, visit surfaces on other planets.  It was very versatile.  You can read about this 60 inch globe at the Fairbanks Museum.  I'd definitely like to go again (not so early in the morning!) and stay a bit longer.  There were a few areas we barely looked at.