A Totally Rockin' Museum!

I have to blog about the fun we had yesterday. It all started last week when the kids were watching Curious George. After it ended, PBS started giving credit to it's sponsors. I mostly tune these out, but as I turned off the TV, the information somehow registered. Shamrock Farms was hosting a free day at the Children's Museum of Phoenix to promote it's new milk line designed with children in mind. Anyway, I immediately looked up the museum to see what it was like. It looked so fun, so I decided to take the time and the gas money and check it out with the kids. Due to working overtime, and having homework, Spencer wasn't able to attend. I'm so glad we went. It was so fun. It was like a giant indoor playground to the kids. To me I saw activities that taught concepts from art and science. Fine motor and gross motor development, and problem solving skills were also included in the play. I was impressed that a lot of the activities and exhibits were constructed out of other things... reused to build amazing things. I was having a field day with the camera. I always feel this desire to capture things when I'm truly impressed. It's like I want to keep that impressed feeling in a bottle or something. It doesn't really work like that, of course, but I do hope to be able to use the pictures to aid in reproducing some of the ideas they had in our own home. It was a totally rockin' museum!When you take a bunch of light scarves of various colors....
Put them in a maze of tubes with a high powered air tunnel inside them...

And let them zoom around until they fly out unexpectedly...

You get this.

Jade painted a hand on the house.

The robot making table... notice the recycled items?

Noodle Forest... pool noodles hanging from the ceiling = the same fun as a ball pit
without the disgusting aspects (like used band aids at the bottom).

A grocery store. It was cool to watch how some kids shopped, some kids manned the registers, some kids bagged, and some kids restocked. Nobody was telling them what to do, and I didn't see one argument over who got to do what. It was neat.

Jade bought a pineapple for Daddy.

Making "pizza" at the Texture Cafe.

Here is the brick oven.

This whole room was dedicated to balls and tracks.
Some were pre-made and some the kids had to construct.

It's racing time! The pit stop had awesome race tracks.
Notice the cars are made from old skate wheels?

Jade was tired at this point. So she took a pit stop to do car puzzles in the pit stop.