As we passed by the huge dinosaurs climbing the walls on the side of the Children’s Museum, I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. I couldn’t begin to imagine how many hours I had spent here as a little kid digging for dinosaur bones in the archaeology exhibit, staring up at the dinosaur skeletons, sitting in the airplane on our way to “visit” Egypt and later on China, playing in the glass-blowing exhibit, and never wanting to leave.
Now I would get to help give the kids of Coburn place the same experience. Previously, we have done two STEM Fairs with Coburn Place, one where our station focused on engineering and one where we focused on math. This time, we were helping chaperone a trip to the Children’s Museum with eight of the kids from Coburn Place.
We met up in the lobby, right next to the huge model of Bumblebee the transformer. Right away, we recognized a few of the kids that we had met at the STEM Fair. Once we got our tickets, it was time to explore the museum.
The first area we went to was the Sports Legends Experience. There were stations where you could learn many different sports, but the kids ran straight past all that. They were only interested in the huge treehouse playground at the end of the road.
After that, we came back inside to the World of Sport, the indoor sports area. In here, there was a basketball shooting game similar to one you would find at an arcade and a hockey activity which we played with the kids. They were very competitive and enthusiastic, and became super excited whenever they scored a goal.
In the room dedicated to Egyptian history, the kids had a lot of fun pushing the buttons that controlled different lights around the room. We also worked together on a puzzle that, when complete, made an Egyptian sarcophagus.
Another highlight was the Ruby Bridges exhibit, which contained a recreation of the classroom she learned in. Being five-year-olds, the kids didn’t quite understand the purpose of the classroom and instead were more focused on who got to play the teacher.
As we walked around the rest of the museum, I saw a little bit of myself in these kids. As they asked me to read them the signs about how Sue the T-Rex died and were barely able to sit still on the “plane ride” to Greece, I was truly reminded me of the exciting, energetic, joy of being a little kid.
P.S. To protect the privacy and safety of the children, we didn’t want to show their faces in photos, so there were not as many pictures in this post as usual.
