AC Gilbert House & OMSI

In Portland we have quite a few museums that are well known to locals and tourists alike. Two popular draws for children and the actual Portland Children's Museum and OMSI. I personally dislike the Children's Museum because often parents don't watch their children, no parking, and it is ridiculously expensive. On the other hand, I LOVE OMSI. It has an amazing preschool playroom-and once they put the water feature back it will have almost the exact same things as the Children's Museum. It also has amazing traveling exhibits. I have been able to see Goosebumps-science of fear, experience CSI, Samson the T-REX, Narnia, Davinci Inventions, Mechanical Dinosaurs, a real mummy from B.C. and more. The problem is it can be spendy too. One tip is they do often offer family memberships at a discount if you work in education. However, I have the best tip ever for OMSI and a children's museum WAY cooler than the Portland one, that is relevant to anyone and everyone!!!

The Science Playground at OMSI (one of the many rooms)

I love finding hidden gems. In Salem (about an hour from Portland) is a great children's museum called A.C. Gilbert Discovery Village. AC Gilbert was the creator of the Erector Set (engineering toy) in the early 1900s. This man was pretty remarkable with being a Gold Medal Olympian, graduated from YALE in medicine, made toys and telescopes, worked in the war efforts, and more. The museum is a group of Victorian Homes on the National Register for Historic Places, and one was Gilbert's Uncle's House. Not only does it have amazing exhibits but it has an amazing backyard play area.  

So the tip you ask: A family membership is $70-up to 5 children. With the membership you get to go to OMSI for free. Yep, the two museums have reciprocity (along with some other cool museums in Eugene, OR and Seattle, WA)! Plus you get a 2 for 1 coupon for the Portland Children's Museum as well. Now OMSI's family membership is $95 and only includes 4 children. That is a $25 savings right there. Portland's Children's Museum family membership is $85 for 4 children and you can't go anywhere else.

Some of the amazing things AC Gilbert's offers:

Market Place

A Favorite: Motion Light Room ("B" crawling)

China Room

New Oregon Agriculture Room (Cows are "B's" fave)

Cute Baby Play Area

Another Fave: Bubble Room!

Jungle Room

Another new edition:Vet Clinic

Shadow Room

Train Room

Dinosaur Room

"B" checking out some of the Erector Sets

Different Homes Outside Play Area

Anyone want to climb through a plant cell?

Outside marimba room

Wholly Mammoth Dig Site

Largest Erector Set to climb through

Pretty Amazing Play Structure-I think

Taking a look at the Solar System

Now that we have explored our moon it was time to look at the planets. We started with talking about what planets are and what they are not. I had printed out a great worksheet that helped "A" with the classification from 1+1+1=1 Solar System Preschool Pack. This is a fabulous resource and I recommend everyone check out all the printables she has!

Next on the agenda for learning we talked about the orbit the planets have around the sun. From Exploring the Solar System by Mary Kay Carson I found an activity to help demonstrate that the planets don't go around the sun in a perfect circle but in a orbit we call elliptical.

1st fold a paper in half both ways. Put a tack in the middle as the sun. Take a string and draw a circle.

Next put a second tack anywhere on the horizontal line. Put the string over both tacks and draw another circle (elliptical orbit)

I had "A" color a sun for the middle and color an Earth to put it on orbit around the sun.

This has some great learning activities but the text is better for children over ten.

 I had "A" watch Magic School Bus Space Adventures because he walks away with a wealth of knowledge that he retains from these movies. The movie is from the 90s so we talked about how when I was younger we said we had nine planets in the solar system, but now they don't classify Pluto as one of the planets. We now call it a dwarf planet and we have new dwarf planets that we didn't recognize before. I tried to tell him it was an exciting time because scientist are really gaining new insight into our solar system, rather than comment on how confusing it is (which it is!!!) We then watched a read a book online at NASA called The First Annual Planet Awards. It was a great way to learn just the most important facts about each planet, a must for short attention spans. We followed up our research with some books from our library. We also looked at space photos, "A's" age and weight on NASA too. "A" had figured out his weight on the other planets earlier when we went to the Seattle Pacific Science Center in May. I then had "A" sort the planets into terrestrial planet and gas giants.

Movie Research:

 Books We Read:

13 Planets by David Aguilar ( an update look at the solar system by National Geographic Kids)

Me and My Place in Space by Joan Sweeny (these ME books are a series and a must read)

There's No Place Like Space by Tish Rabe

The Planets in Our Solar System by Franklyn Branley (Read-and-Find-Out Science book)

Pacific Science Center:

"A" in a space capsule

Sorting the Planets:

Planets are from the preschool pack mentioned earlier!

Then it came time for our huge activity of the day. I took the printable planets that I got from 1+1+1=1 blog (mentioned above) and we went for a walk to do a scaled down look at the distance of the planets from each other and the sun. Our front door was the sun (since that is the center of our universe), and then using a guide in the Exploring the Solar System book mentioned earlier we started counting our steps. It was great practice for "A" to practice his counting higher than 30. It was remarkable how far we got!

Our guide for you to try!

The sun-our starting point

The four terrestrial planets (pretty close to the sun and each other)

Our first gas giant starting to get farther away

Our planets on the sidewalk. Luckily no one took them. We put rocks on them so they wouldn't blow away!

Saturn-our house is at the big tree and up the driveway

Our ending point (Neptune). Our house is two trees up!

Finally, since I can't finish any day of learning with out some art strewn in "A" made two solar systems. The first is chalk around circles to give it almost a eclipse look. The second is a spattered paint solar system. I walked to make planets to go on the splattered paint but "A" was anxious to use his space stickers.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

I don't know how but "A" saw some clips of a Narnia movie and has been begging me to watch them. On top of that, he knows I love the Harry Potter, so that is the other request. At 5 years old there is no way I am ready to introduce Harry Potter (I'm thinking around 7 years old). I tend to have a strong believe that one should read a story first before watching the movie. After reading some chapter books as read-alouds to see if he could comprehend them and also have the attention span to sit still... I made the decision to read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. The fact, that our local science museum is doing a Narnia traveling exhibit helped cement my plans. It took us about 5 weeks to read the 17 chapters and every night it was "just one more chapter" from my little book-lover. I found a lapbook from Homeschool Share, so  every three chapters I would make sure we stopped and answered the reading comprehension questions. The questions were great for a young child because it was simple question and answer, and it was a good way to gauge "A's" understanding. As a teacher, I really wish there was some more critical thinking and text-to-self connection type questions.  Also, the lapbook does a lot of connecting the story to Christian values and makes connections to Bible verses. I kept some of those in (like the comparison to Aslan to Jesus) but a lot of it was beyond "A's" understanding and more than I wanted to introduce, so I just omitted those questions.

"A's" drawing of Lucy with the lamppost in snowy Narnia

There is quite a few questions of the course of the book!

Other reading comprehension activities:

Making Strawberry Turkish Delight (recipe in lapbook)

Candy-making was a lot of harder than I expected

I started calling "A" Edmund because all he did was try to sneak more Turkish Delight!

Pretty yummy if I say so myself!

Got Picture with the White Witch (during library opening)

Watched the 2005 movie and did a Venn Diagram (stored on back of lapbook)

Went to OMSI to see exhibit. Couldn't take pics inside but mostly movie props.