The younger Free-Ride offspring would like to report on a recent field trip to the Math/Science Nucleus.
Younger offspring: What's a nucleus anyway?
Dr. Free-Ride: It's what's at the center of things. The cells in your body have nuclei, and so do the atoms that those cells are made of.
Younger offspring: The atoms of different elements?
Dr. Free-Ride: Yep.
Most of the field trip involved a scavenger hunt that took the kids through the different parts of the Children's Natural History Museum. Having some experience with scavanger hunts of this sort (since we did one at the visitor center at Kettle Moraine State Forest last summer), the younger Free-Ride offspring opined that this is a neat way to learn stuff in a museum.
Younger offspring: When you're trying to answer questions, you look at the things and read the words more carefully. When you're just going through a museum and trying to look at everything in order, sometimes it can get boring. But the hunt is exciting.
Dr. Free-Ride: What did you learn?
Younger offspring: We learned the names of the periods in the Mesozoic Era. The middle one is the Jurassic, and the last one is the Cretagous.
Dr. Free-Ride: Cretaceous.
Younger offspring: Cretaceous. I remembered that it sounded a little like "courageous".
Dr. Free-Ride: Gotcha.
Younger offspring: And I don't remember the first one.
(We looked it up: Triassic.)
Not only did the scavenger hunt lead the kids through which kinds of dinosaurs lived in which period, but it also had them tracking down facts like how much longer we can expect the sun to be giving us light and heat, and brought them through a hall of (post-dinosaur) fossils found in the Bay Area ... by a bunch of kids!
Younger offspring: The website also has a bunch of animated story books. I think they're probably for kids who are a little younger than me, but I liked them, too.
Finally, in the aftermath, the younger offspring offers one of those poem-like thingies kids write about a subject that is spelled out by the first letter of each line. (Is there a proper name for these?)
Deadly destroyer.
It makes an intelligent imprint.
New to humans.
Outrageously old animal.
Sneaky slinker.
Athletic monster.
Undefeatable creature.
Roaming the planet.
* * * * *
ACTION ITEM:
A bunch of people have been turning up in old posts asking about the dinosaur songs the younger Free-Ride offspring used to sing in pre-school, looking for recordings and/or sheet music for these songs. (Approximate lyrics for the three songs in question are here.)
Let's track down these songs -- either commercial recordings or people singing them on YouTube, published sheet music or handwritten sheet music in someone's guitar case.
As an incentive, if you post a tip that helps us find any of the three songs in question (sheet music or recording), I'd be happy to mail you a set of Friday Sprog Blogging temporary tattoos (not available in stores).
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Janet -- YO has created a piece of acrostic poetry:
You can see the definition of different kinds of poetry at Shadow Poetry
Try this. Includes a link to an album named "Our Dinosaur Friends"
My apologies, the above may well be infringing copyright but I can't find any commercial outlet so far.
"Our Dinosaur Friends" was created by Art Barduhn and others in 1978 and distributed by "American Teaching Aids" of Covina CA.
The following appears to indicate that some libraries are holding copies: WorldCat.
The original distributors were taken over by Simon & Schuster in the late eighties so I can only assume they are now part of Pearson Education so I guess a call to them might be the best way to go if your local library doesn't hold it or can't pull it in from someone else's archive.