We hadn't been to the science museum for several months, so it was all somewhat new to Alice again. Two-and-a-half seems to be a magical age where she's not just looking at stuff anymore, she's starting to be able to learn about and understand new things. Although the single thing that excited her most at the museum was getting to ride the escalator between the museum's four floors, she was interested in all the exhibits as well.
On the ground floor in the coastal section, there was an exhibit showing baby sea turtles hatching from eggs. I explained to her how the mommy turtle lays the eggs, then the baby turtles grow, hatch, and run to the sea. Later, on an upper floor where we were having a snack, we could see a bird's nest with some little eggs in it. Zac asked her what was in the eggs, and she answered, "Baby turtles!" Zac tried again, emphasizing that it was a bird's nest and that a bird had laid the eggs, but Alice still insisted there were baby turtles inside. This, despite even having a couple of story books at home that feature birds, their nests, and baby birds hatching out of the eggs.
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| Showing Alice the baby turtles hatching from eggs in the sand |
Other moments at the museum were more promising. Actually, her visit to the small dinosaur exhibit was scarily impressive for a two and a half year old. It started off with a weird coincidence: when Zac asked her about the Acrocanthrosaurous skull on display the first thing out of her mouth was that it was "real." Unlike almost all the other skulls she had seen this one was notable for actually being real. After a few moments gaping at the huge display (a acrocanthosaurous skeleton, similar to the T-rex, and a fleshed out sauropod) Zac prompted her to explain the giant depressions in the "mud" behind the dinosaur. She knew that they were footprints (we had learned a lot about footprints during recent walks in the snow). She then ran up to the casts comparing the front limbs of the Acro and the T-rex and pointed out that they were the claws and then correctly counted them (three and two). She saw the giant wound in the skin of the dinosaur and said it had a boo-boo and needed a bandaid. There was also a short video on a mounted monitor showing a dinosaur attacking and biting another; when Sera came back from feeding Simon she excitedly explained what had happened to the dinosaurs in the room - putting together the content of the video and the dinosaurs on display.
Because it was Darwin Day at the museum, there were many tables set up with volunteers and interactive lessons about parts of evolution. At one station, Alice made a microphage out of pipecleaner and beads. At others she got a tattoo of a "climbing monkey", made a dinosaur magnet, and colored a picture of a turtle. One of the highlights was a station meant to teach about how different birds adapted beaks with shapes related to the type of food they eat. There were two bowls of "seeds": one large puffs and another with small seeds. The task was to take a pair of plastic pincers that approximated finch beaks and grasp the seeds and feed them into a giant paper mache bird with an open beak. One was supposed to be harder (and thus demonstrating that it would be easier for a finch with that beak to eat the seeds) but Alice carefully plucked one of each and put it into the bird. Zac tried to rescue the lesson by saying that the birds who were able to eat the food better had more babies. (The highschoolers volunteering at the table quipped that they wondered why their teacher had to spend three weeks teaching such a basic concept.) Alice of course didn't understand the meaning. But it is a start. She didn't know the colors after the first lesson either and slowly but surely she grasped the idea after many exposures.
Another thing they had because of Darwin Day was a table of bones (mostly skulls), where you could see the evolution of the earliest hominids into modern homo sapiens. I thought Alice would get a kick out of seeing and touching the skulls, because she's still obsessed with skeletons from Halloween, and we have a pirate-themed book from the library that features lots of skulls and crossbones, and there is even a real skull in one of the caves in the book that Alice always likes to point out. We got off to a good start, where a volunteer handed her a bony hand. Alice wasn't afraid to hold it, and I told her how those were the bones like in our hand. To test her understanding, I asked her which one was the thumb and she correctly identified the shortest digit. However, things took a sharp turn when the next volunteer picked up a cast of Lucy's skull and the jaw bone at first stuck in place then dropped suddenly as she lifted the skull towards Alice. Alice was quite startled and scared. She clung to me the rest of the time and could not be coaxed into touching a skull. Later, at home, she recalled that "The bones were trying to eat me!"
On the top floor, there is a very small rain forest with a sloth, a turtle, and some butterflies. Alice did a pretty good job trying to match the butterflies in real life to the ones on the guide. She knows all about matching things from school. There were other moments where I could tell the little lessons they get in daycare had stuck in her head. Whenever she sees a globe, she knows right away that it is the earth. She always says, "The earth goes around the sun." She sounds quite intelligent if you can get past her pronunciation of "erf" for "earth." Whether or not she really understands what she's saying, I don't know, but it's a start. There is other evidence that she's starting to get a sense of things. For example, during a segment on the space race at home when we were watching the Olympics, she saw an astronaut going into space and she asked, "Where's the moon?"All in all, it was a really fun day, really getting to see Alice's thinking and reasoning skills start to hatch. We look forward to the day when she'll understand evolution and realize that she comes from an ape, not a pig.
